The State and Revolution
========================
V.I. Lenin

Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm


Preface to the First Edition
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


The question of the state is now acquiring particular importance
      both in theory and in practical politics.  The imperialist war
      has immensely accelerated and intensified the process of
      transformation of monopoly capitalism into state-monopoly
      capitalism.  The monstrous oppression of the working people by
      the state, which is merging more and more with the all-powerful
      capitalist associations, is becoming increasingly monstrous.
      The advanced countries - we mean their hinterland - are becoming
      military convict prisons for the workers.

The unprecedented horrors and miseries of the protracted war are
      making the people's position unbearable and increasing their
      anger.  The world proletarian revolution is clearly maturing.
      The question of its relation to the state is acquiring practical
      importance.

The elements of opportunism that accumulated over the decades of
      comparatively peaceful development have given rise to the trend
      of social-chauvinism which dominated the official socialist
      parties throughout the world.  This trend - socialism in words
      and chauvinism in deeds (Plekhanov, Potresov, Breshkovskaya,
      Rubanovich, and, in a slightly veiled form, Tsereteli, Chernov
      and Co. in Russia; Scheidemann, Legien, David and others in
      Germany; Renaudel, Guesde and Vandervelde in France and Belgium;
      Hyndman and the

      Fabians [1] in England, etc., etc.) - is conspicuous
      for the base, servile adaptation of the "leaders of socialism"
      to the interests not only of "their" national bourgeoisie, but
      of "their" state, for the majority of the so-called Great Powers
      have long been exploiting and enslaving a whole number of small
      and weak nations.  And the imperialist war is a war for the
      division and redivision of this kind of booty.  The struggle to
      free the working people from the influence of the bourgeoisie in
      general, and of the imperialist bourgeoisie in particular, is
      impossible without a struggle against opportunist prejudices
      concerning the "state".

First of all we examine the theory of Marx and Engels of the
      state, and dwell in particular detail on those aspects of this
      theory which are ignored or have been distorted by the
      opportunists.  Then we deal specially with the one who is
      chiefly responsible for these distortions, Karl Kautsky, the
      best-known leader of the Second International (1889-1914), which
      has met with such miserable bankruptcy in the present war.
      Lastly, we sum up the main results of the experience of the
      Russian revolutions of 1905 and particularly of 1917.
      Apparently, the latter is now (early August 1917) completing the
      first stage of its development; but this revolution as a whole
      can only be understood as a link in a chain of socialist
      proletarian revolutions being caused by the imperialist war.
      The question of the relation of the socialist proletarian
      revolution to the state, therefore, is acquiring not only
      practical political importance, but also the significance of a
      most urgent problem of the day, the problem of explaining to the
      masses what they will have to do before long to free themselves
      from capitalist tyranny.

The Author

August  1917


Preface to the Second Edition
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


The present, second edition is published virtually unaltered, except
      that section 3 had been added to Chapter II.

The Author

Moscow December 17, 1918


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Endnotes
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[1] Fabians--members of the Fabian Society, a British reformist organisation
      founded in 1884. It grouped mostly bourgeois intellectuals--scholars,
      writers, politicians--including Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Ramsay MacDonald
      and Bernard Shaw. The Fabians denied the necessity for the proletarian class
      struggle and for the socialist revolution. They contended that the
      transition from capitalism to socialism could only be effected through minor
      social reforms, that is, gradual changes. Lenin described Fabian ideas as
      "an extremely opportunist trend" (see present edition, Vol. 13, p. 358).

In 1900 the Fabian Society became part of the British Labour Party. "Fabian
      socialism" is a source of the Labour Party's ideology.

During the First World War the Fabians took a social-chauvinist stand. For
      Lenin's characterisation of Fabian principles, see Lenin's article "British
      Pacifism and the British Dislike of Theory" (present edition, Vol. 21, pp.
      260-65).

Class Society and the State


The State: a Product of the Irreconcilability of
	Class Antagonisms Special Bodies of Armed Men, Prisons, etc. The State: an Instrument for the Exploitation of
	the Oppressed Class The “Withering Away” of the State, and Violent Revolution


1. The State: A Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance , blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the “national-German” Marx, who, they claim, educated the labor unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a predatory war!

In these circumstances, in view of the unprecedently wide-spread distortion of Marxism, our prime task is to re-establish what Marx really taught on the subject of the state. This will necessitate a number of long quotations from the works of Marx and Engels themselves. Of course, long quotations will render the text cumbersome and not help at all to make it popular reading, but we cannot possibly dispense with them. All, or at any rate all the most essential passages in the works of Marx and Engels on the subject of the state must by all means be quoted as fully as possible so that the reader may form an independent opinion of the totality of the views of the founders of scientific socialism, and of the evolution of those views, and so that their distortion by the “Kautskyism” now prevailing may be documentarily proved and clearly demonstrated.

Let us begin with the most popular of Engels’ works, The Origin 	of the Family, Private Property and the State , the sixth 	edition of which was published in Stuttgart as far back as 	1894. We have to translate the quotations from the German 	originals, as the Russian translations, while very numerous, 	are for the most part either incomplete or very 	unsatisfactory.

Summing up his historical analysis, Engels says:

“The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it ’the reality of the ethical idea’, ’the image and reality of reason’, as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ’order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.” (Pp.177-78, sixth edition) [1]

This expresses with perfect clarity the basic idea of Marxism with regard to the historical role and the meaning of the state. The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.

It is on this most important and fundamental point that the distortion of Marxism, proceeding along two main lines, begins.

On the one hand, the bourgeois, and particularly the petty-bourgeois, ideologists, compelled under the weight of indisputable historical facts to admit that the state only exists where there are class antagonisms and a class struggle, “correct” Marx in such a way as to make it appear that the state is an organ for the reconciliation of classes. According to Marx, the state could neither have arisen nor maintained itself had it been possible to reconcile classes. From what the petty-bourgeois and philistine professors and publicists say, with quite frequent and benevolent references to Marx, it appears that the state does reconcile classes. According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order”, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes. In the opinion of the petty-bourgeois politicians, however, order means the reconciliation of classes, and not the oppression of one class by another; to alleviate the conflict means reconciling classes and not depriving the oppressed classes of definite means and methods of struggle to overthrow the oppressors.

For instance, when, in the revolution of 1917, the question of the significance and role of the state arose in all its magnitude as a practical question demanding immediate action, and, moreover, action on a mass scale, all the Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks descended at once to the petty-bourgeois theory that the “state” “reconciles” classes. Innumerable resolutions and articles by politicians of both these parties are thoroughly saturated with this petty-bourgeois and philistine “reconciliation” theory. That the state is an organ of the rule of a definite class which cannot be reconciled with its antipode (the class opposite to it) is something the petty-bourgeois democrats will never be able to understand. Their attitude to the state is one of the most striking manifestations of the fact that our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks are not socialists at all (a point that we Bolsheviks have always maintained), but petty-bourgeois democrats using near-socialist phraseology.

On the other hand, the “Kautskyite” distortion of Marxism is far more subtle. “Theoretically”, it is not denied that the state is an organ of class rule, or that class antagonisms are irreconcilable. But what is overlooked or glossed over is this: if the state is the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms, if it is a power standing above society and “alienating itself more and more from it”, it is clear that the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class and which is the embodiment of this “alienation”. As we shall see later, Marx very explicitly drew this theoretically self-evident conclusion on the strength of a concrete historical analysis of the tasks of the revolution. And — as we shall show in detail further on — it is this conclusion which Kautsky has “forgotten” and distorted.


2. Special Bodies of Armed Men, Prisons, etc.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Engels continues:

“As distinct from the old gentile [tribal or clan] order, [2] the state, first, divides its subjects according to territory....”

This division seems “natural” to us, but it costs a prolonged struggle against the old organization according to generations or tribes.

“The second distinguishing feature is the establishment of a public power which no longer directly coincides with the population organizing itself as an armed force. This special, public power is necessary because a self-acting armed organization of the population has become impossible since the split into classes.... This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds, of which gentile [clan] society knew nothing...."

Engels elucidates the concept of the “power” which is called the state, a power which arose from society but places itself above it and alienates itself more and more from it. What does this power mainly consist of? It consists of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command.

We are justified in speaking of special bodies of armed men, because the public power which is an attribute of every state “does not directly coincide” with the armed population, with its “self-acting armed organization".

Like all great revolutionary thinkers, Engels tries to draw the attention of the class-conscious workers to what prevailing philistinism regards as least worthy of attention, as the most habitual thing, hallowed by prejudices that are not only deep-rooted but, one might say, petrified. A standing army and police are the chief instruments of state power. But how can it be otherwise?

From the viewpoint of the vast majority of Europeans of the end of the 19th century, whom Engels was addressing, and who had not gone through or closely observed a single great revolution, it could not have been otherwise. They could not understand at all what a “self-acting armed organization of the population” was. When asked why it became necessary to have special bodies of armed men placed above society and alienating themselves from it (police and a standing army), the West-European and Russian philistines are inclined to utter a few phrases borrowed from Spencer or Mikhailovsky, to refer to the growing complexity of social life, the differentiation of functions, and so on.

Such a reference seems “scientific”, and effectively lulls the ordinary person to sleep by obscuring the important and basic fact, namely, the split of society into irreconcilable antagonistic classes.

Were it not for this split, the “self-acting armed organization of the population” would differ from the primitive organization of a stick-wielding herd of monkeys, or of primitive men, or of men united in clans, by its complexity, its high technical level, and so on. But such an organization would still be possible.

It is impossible because civilized society is split into antagonistic, and, moreover, irreconcilably antagonistic classes, whose “self-acting” arming would lead to an armed struggle between them. A state arises, a special power is created, special bodies of armed men, and every revolution, by destroying the state apparatus, shows us the naked class struggle, clearly shows us how the ruling class strives to restore the special bodies of armed men which serve it, and how the oppressed class strives to create a new organization of this kind, capable of serving the exploited instead of the exploiters.

In the above argument, Engels raises theoretically the very same question which every great revolution raises before us in practice, palpably and, what is more, on a scale of mass action, namely, the question of the relationship between “special” bodies of armed men and the “self-acting armed organization of the population". We shall see how this question is specifically illustrated by the experience of the European and Russian revolutions.

He points out that sometimes — in certain parts of North America, for example — this public power is weak (he has in mind a rare exception in capitalist society, and those parts of North America in its pre-imperialist days where the free colonists predominated), but that, generally speaking, it grows stronger:

“It [the public power] grows stronger, however, in proportion as class antagonisms within the state become more acute, and as adjacent states become larger and more populous. We have only to look at our present-day Europe, where class struggle and rivalry in conquest have tuned up the public power to such a pitch that it threatens to swallow the whole of society and even the state."

This was written not later than the early nineties of the last century, Engels’ last preface being dated June 16, 1891. The turn towards imperialism — meaning the complete domination of the trusts, the omnipotence of the big banks, a grand-scale colonial policy, and so forth — was only just beginning in France, and was even weaker in North America and in Germany. Since then “rivalry in conquest” has taken a gigantic stride, all the more because by the beginning of the second decade of the 20th century the world had been completely divided up among these “rivals in conquest”, i.e., among the predatory Great Powers. Since then, military and naval armaments have grown fantastically and the predatory war of 1914-17 for the domination of the world by Britain or Germany, for the division of the spoils, has brought the “swallowing” of all the forces of society by the rapacious state power close to complete catastrophe.

Engels’ could, as early as 1891, point to “rivalry in conquest” as one of the most important distinguishing features of the foreign policy of the Great Powers, while the social-chauvinist scoundrels have ever since 1914, when this rivalry, many time intensified, gave rise to an imperialist war, been covering up the defence of the predatory interests of “their own” bourgeoisie with phrases about “defence of the fatherland”, “defence of the republic and the revolution”, etc.!


3. The State: an Instrument for the Exploitation of the Oppressed Class
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


The maintenance of the special public power standing above society requires taxes and state loans.

“Having public power and the right to levy taxes,” Engels writes, “the officials now stand, as organs of society, above society. The free, voluntary respect that was accorded to the organs of the gentile [clan] constitution does not satisfy them, even if they could gain it....” Special laws are enacted proclaiming the sanctity and immunity of the officials. “The shabbiest police servant” has more “authority” than the representative of the clan, but even the head of the military power of a civilized state may well envy the elder of a clan the “unrestrained respect” of society.

The question of the privileged position of the officials as organs of state power is raised here. The main point indicated is: what is it that places them above society? We shall see how this theoretical question was answered in practice by the Paris Commune in 1871 and how it was obscured from a reactionary standpoint by Kautsky in 1912.

“Because the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but because it arose, at the same time, in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class....” The ancient and feudal states were organs for the exploitation of the slaves and serfs; likewise, “the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labor by capital. By way of exception, however, periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power as ostensible mediator acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both....” Such were the absolute monarchies of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Bonapartism of the First and Second Empires in France, and the Bismarck regime in Germany.

Such, we may add, is the Kerensky government in republican Russia since it began to persecute the revolutionary proletariat, at a moment when, owing to the leadership of the petty-bourgeois democrats, the Soviets have already become impotent, while the bourgeoisie are not yet strong enough simply to disperse them.

In a democratic republic, Engels continues, “wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely”, first, by means of the “direct corruption of officials” (America); secondly, by means of an “alliance of the government and the Stock Exchange” (France and America).

At present, imperialism and the domination of the banks have “developed” into an exceptional art both these methods of upholding and giving effect to the omnipotence of wealth in democratic republics of all descriptions. Since, for instance, in the very first months of the Russian democratic republic, one might say during the honeymoon of the “socialist” S.R.s and Mensheviks joined in wedlock to the bourgeoisie, in the coalition government. Mr. Palchinsky obstructed every measure intended for curbing the capitalists and their marauding practices, their plundering of the state by means of war contracts; and since later on Mr. Palchinsky, upon resigning from the Cabinet (and being, of course, replaced by another quite similar Palchinsky), was “rewarded” by the capitalists with a lucrative job with a salary of 120,000 rubles per annum — what would you call that? Direct or indirect bribery? An alliance of the government and the syndicates, or “merely” friendly relations? What role do the Chernovs, Tseretelis, Avksentyevs and Skobelevs play? Are they the “direct” or only the indirect allies of the millionaire treasury-looters?

Another reason why the omnipotence of “wealth” is more certain in a democratic republic is that it does not depend on defects in the political machinery or on the faulty political shell of capitalism. A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell (through the Palchinskys, Chernovs, Tseretelis and Co.), it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.

We must also note that Engels is most explicit in calling universal suffrage as well an instrument of bourgeois rule. Universal suffrage, he says, obviously taking account of the long experience of German Social-Democracy, is

“the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state."

The petty-bourgeois democrats, such as our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, and also their twin brothers, all the social-chauvinists and opportunists of Western Europe, expect just this “more” from universal suffrage. They themselves share, and instil into the minds of the people, the false notion that universal suffrage “in the present-day state” is really capable of revealing the will of the majority of the working people and of securing its realization.

Here, we can only indicate this false notion, only point out that Engels’ perfectly clear statement is distorted at every step in the propaganda and agitation of the “official” (i.e., opportunist) socialist parties. A detailed exposure of the utter falsity of this notion which Engels brushes aside here is given in our further account of the views of Marx and Engels on the “present-day” state.

Engels gives a general summary of his views in the most popular of his works in the following words:

“The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe."

We do not often come across this passage in the propaganda and agitation literature of the present-day Social-Democrats. Even when we do come across it, it is mostly quoted in the same manner as one bows before an icon, i.e., it is done to show official respect for Engels, and no attempt is made to gauge the breadth and depth of the revolution that this relegating of “the whole machinery of state to a museum of antiquities” implies. In most cases we do not even find an understanding of what Engels calls the state machine.


4. The “Withering Away” of the State, and Violent Revolution
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Engels’ words regarding the “withering away” of the state are so widely known, they are often quoted, and so clearly reveal the essence of the customary adaptation of Marxism to opportunism that we must deal with them in detail. We shall quote the whole argument from which they are taken.

“The proletariat seizes from state power and turns the means of production into state property to begin with. But thereby it abolishes itself as the proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, and abolishes also the state as state. Society thus far, operating amid class antagonisms, needed the state, that is, an organization of the particular exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited class in the conditions of oppression determined by the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom or bondage, wage-labor). The state was the official representative of society as a whole, its concentration in a visible corporation. But it was this only insofar as it was the state of that class which itself represented, for its own time, society as a whole: in ancient times, the state of slave-owning citizens; in the Middle Ages, of the feudal nobility; in our own time, of the bourgeoisie. When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon the present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from this struggle, are removed, nothing more remains to be held in subjection — nothing necessitating a special coercive force, a state. The first act by which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — is also its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not ’abolished’. It withers away. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase ’a free people’s state’, both as to its justifiable use for a long time from an agitational point of view, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency; and also of the so-called anarchists’ demand that the state be abolished overnight." ( Herr 	Eugen Duhring’s Revolution in Science 	[Anti-Duhring] , pp.301-03, third German edition.) [3]

It is safe to say that of this argument of Engels’, which is so remarkably rich in ideas, only one point has become an integral part of socialist thought among modern socialist parties, namely, that according to Marx that state “withers away” — as distinct from the anarchist doctrine of the “abolition” of the state. To prune Marxism to such an extent means reducing it to opportunism, for this “interpretation” only leaves a vague notion of a slow, even, gradual change, of absence of leaps and storms, of absence of revolution. The current, widespread, popular, if one may say so, conception of the “withering away” of the state undoubtedly means obscuring, if not repudiating, revolution.

Such an “interpretation”, however, is the crudest distortion of Marxism, advantageous only to the bourgeoisie. In point of theory, it is based on disregard for the most important circumstances and considerations indicated in, say, Engels’ “summary” argument we have just quoted in full.

In the first place, at the very outset of his argument, Engels says that, in seizing state power, the proletariat thereby “abolishes the state as state". It is not done to ponder over the meaning of this. Generally, it is either ignored altogether, or is considered to be something in the nature of “Hegelian weakness” on Engels’ part. As a matter of fact, however, these words briefly express the experience of one of the greatest proletarian revolutions, the Paris Commune of 1871, of which we shall speak in greater detail in its proper place. As a matter of fact, Engels speaks here of the proletariat revolution “abolishing” the bourgeois state, while the words about the state withering away refer to the remnants of the proletarian state after the socialist revolution. According to Engels, the bourgeois state does not “wither away”, but is “abolished” by the proletariat in the course of the revolution. What withers away after this revolution is the proletarian state or semi-state.

Secondly, the state is a “special coercive force". Engels gives this splendid and extremely profound definition here with the utmost lucidity. And from it follows that the “special coercive force” for the suppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, of millions of working people by handfuls of the rich, must be replaced by a “special coercive force” for the suppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat (the dictatorship of the proletariat). This is precisely what is meant by “abolition of the state as state". This is precisely the “act” of taking possession of the means of production in the name of society. And it is self-evident that such a replacement of one (bourgeois) “special force” by another (proletarian) “special force” cannot possibly take place in the form of “withering away".

Thirdly, in speaking of the state “withering away”, and the even more graphic and colorful “dying down of itself”, Engels refers quite clearly and definitely to the period after “the state has taken possession of the means of production in the name of the whole of society”, that is, after the socialist revolution. We all know that the political form of the “state” at that time is the most complete democracy. But it never enters the head of any of the opportunists, who shamelessly distort Marxism, that Engels is consequently speaking here of democracy “dying down of itself”, or “withering away". This seems very strange at first sight. But it is “incomprehensible” only to those who have not thought about democracy also being a state and, consequently, also disappearing when the state disappears. Revolution alone can “abolish” the bourgeois state. The state in general, i.e., the most complete democracy, can only “wither away".

Fourthly, after formulating his famous proposition that “the state withers away”, Engels at once explains specifically that this proposition is directed against both the opportunists and the anarchists. In doing this, Engels puts in the forefront that conclusion, drawn from the proposition that “the state withers away”, which is directed against the opportunists.

One can wager that out of every 10,000 persons who have read or heard about the “withering away” of the state, 9,990 are completely unaware, or do not remember, that Engels directed his conclusions from that proposition not against anarchists alone. And of the remaining 10, probably nine do not know the meaning of a “free people’s state” or why an attack on this slogan means an attack on opportunists. This is how history is written! This is how a great revolutionary teaching is imperceptibly falsified and adapted to prevailing philistinism. The conclusion directed against the anarchists has been repeated thousands of times; it has been vulgarized, and rammed into people’s heads in the shallowest form, and has acquired the strength of a prejudice, whereas the conclusion directed against the opportunists has been obscured and “forgotten”!

The “free people’s state” was a programme demand and a catchword current among the German Social-Democrats in the seventies. This catchword is devoid of all political content except that it describes the concept of democracy in a pompous philistine fashion. Insofar as it hinted in a legally permissible manner at a democratic republic, Engels was prepared to “justify” its use “for a time” from an agitational point of view. But it was an opportunist catchword, for it amounted to nothing more than prettifying bourgeois democracy, and was also a failure to understand the socialist criticism of the state in general. We are in favor of a democratic republic as the best form of state for the proletariat under capitalism. But we have no right to forget that wage slavery is the lot of the people even in the most democratic bourgeois republic. Furthermore, every state is a “special force” for the suppression of the oppressed class. Consequently, every state is not “free” and not a “people’s state". Marx and Engels explained this repeatedly to their party comrades in the seventies.

Fifthly, the same work of Engels’, whose arguments about the withering away of the state everyone remembers, also contains an argument of the significance of violent revolution. Engels’ historical analysis of its role becomes a veritable panegyric on violent revolution. This, “no one remembers". It is not done in modern socialist parties to talk or even think about the significance of this idea, and it plays no part whatever in their daily propaganda and agitation among the people. And yet it is inseparably bound up with the ”withering away” of the state into one harmonious whole.

Here is Engels’ argument:

“...That force, however, plays yet another role [other than that of a diabolical power] in history, a revolutionary role; that, in the words of Marx, it is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one, that it is the instrument with which social movement forces its way through and shatters the dead, fossilized political forms — of this there is not a word in Herr Duhring. It is only with sighs and groans that he admits the possibility that force will perhaps be necessary for the overthrow of an economy based on exploitation — unfortunately, because all use of force demoralizes, he says, the person who uses it. And this in Germany, where a violent collision — which may, after all, be forced on the people — would at least have the advantage of wiping out the servility which has penetrated the nation’s mentality following the humiliation of the Thirty Years’ War. [4] And this person’s mode of thought — dull, insipid, and impotent — presumes to impose itself on the most revolutionary party that history has ever known! (p.193, third German edition, Part II, end of Chap.IV)

How can this panegyric on violent revolution, which Engels insistently brought to the attention of the German Social-Democrats between 1878 and 1894, i.e., right up to the time of his death, be combined with the theory of the “withering away” of the state to form a single theory?

Usually the two are combined by means of eclecticism, by an unprincipled or sophistic selection made arbitrarily (or to please the powers that be) of first one, then another argument, and in 99 cases out of 100, if not more, it is the idea of the “withering away” that is placed in the forefront. Dialectics are replaced by eclecticism — this is the most usual, the most wide-spread practice to be met with in present-day official Social-Democratic literature in relation to Marxism. This sort of substitution is, of course, nothing new; it was observed even in the history of classical Greek philosophy. In falsifying Marxism in opportunist fashion, the substitution of eclecticism for dialectics is the easiest way of deceiving the people. It gives an illusory satisfaction; it seems to take into account all sides of the process, all trends of development, all the conflicting influences, and so forth, whereas in reality it provides no integral and revolutionary conception of the process of social development at all.

We have already said above, and shall show more fully later, that the theory of Marx and Engels of the inevitability of a violent revolution refers to the bourgeois state. The latter cannot be superseded by the proletarian state (the dictatorship of the proletariat) through the process of ”withering away”, but, as a general rule, only through a violent revolution. The panegyric Engels sang in its honor, and which fully corresponds to Marx’s repeated statements (see the concluding passages of The Poverty of Philosophy [5] and the Communist Manifesto , [6] with their proud and open proclamation of the inevitability of a violent revolution; see what Marx wrote nearly 30 years later, in criticizing the Gotha Programme of 	1875 , [7] when he mercilessly castigated the opportunist character of that programme) — this panegyric is by no means a mere “impulse”, a mere declamation or a polemical sally. The necessity of systematically imbuing the masses with this and precisely this view of violent revolution lies at the root of the entire theory of Marx and Engels. The betrayal of their theory by the now prevailing social-chauvinist and Kautskyite trends expresses itself strikingly in both these trends ignoring such propaganda and agitation.

The supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution. The abolition of the proletarian state, i.e., of the state in general, is impossible except through the process of “withering away".

A detailed and concrete elaboration of these views was given by Marx and Engels when they studied each particular revolutionary situation, when they analyzed the lessons of the experience of each particular revolution. We shall now pass to this, undoubtedly the most important, part of their theory.


------------------------------------------------------------
Endnotes
------------------------------------------------------------


[1] See Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, Moscow, 1973, pp. 326-27).

Further below, on pp. 393-95, 395-99 of the volume, Lenin is quoting from the same work by Engels (op. cit., pp. 327-30).

[2] Gentile, or tribal, organisation of society-the primitive communal system, or the first socio-economic formation in history. The tribal commune was a community of blood relatives linked by economic and social ties. The tribal system went through the matriarchal and the patriarchal periods. The patriarchate culminated in primitive society becoming a class society and in the rise of the state. Relations of production under the primitive communal system were based on social ownership of the means of production and equalitarian distribution of all products. This corresponded in the main to the low level of the productive forces and to their character at the time.

For the primitive communal system, see Karl Marx, Conspectus of Lewis Morgan’s “Ancient Society”, and Frederick Engels. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, Moscow, 1973, pp. 204-334).

[3] See Frederick Engels, Anti-Duhring, Moscow, 1969, pp. 332-33.

Further down, on p. 404 of this volume, Lenin is quoting from the same work by Engels (op. cit., p. 220).

[4] Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), the first European war, resulted from an aggravation of the antagonisms between various alignments of European states, and took the form of a struggle between Protestants and Catholics. It began with a revolt in Bohemia against the tyranny of the Hapsburg monarchy and the onslaught of Catholic reaction. The states which then entered the war formed two camps. The Pope, the Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs and the Catholic princes of Germany, who rallied to the Catholic Church, opposed the Protestant countries—Bohemia, Denmark, Sweden, the Dutch Republic, and a number of German states that had accepted the Reformation. The Protestant countries were backed by the French kings, enemies of the Hapsburgs. Germany became the chief battlefield and object of military plunder and predatory claims. The war ended in 1648 with the signing of the Peace Treaty of Westphalia, which completed the political dismemberment of Germany.

[5] See Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Moscow, 1973, pp. 151-52.

[6] See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 1, Moscow, 1973, p. 137.

[7] Gotha Programme—-the programme adopted by the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany in 1875, at the Gotha Congress, which united two German socialist parties, namely, the Eisenachers-led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht and influenced by Marx and Engels-and the Lassalleans. The programme betrayed eclecticism and was opportunist, because the Eisenachers had made concessions to the Lassalleans on major issues and accepted Lassallean formulations. Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme , and Engels in his letter to Bebel of March 18-28, 1875, devastated the Gotha Programme, which they regarded as a serious step backwards compared with the Eisenach programme of 1869.

The Experience of 1848-51


The Eve of Revolution The Revolution Summed Up The Presentation of the Question by Marx in 1852


1. The Eve of Revolution
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


The first works of mature Marxism — The
      Poverty of Philosophy and the Communist
      Manifesto — appeared just on the eve of the revolution
      of 1848.  For this reason, in addition to presenting the general
      principles of Marxism, they reflect to a certain degree the
      concrete revolutionary situation of the time.  It will,
      therefore, be more expedient, perhaps, to examine what the
      authors of these works said about the state immediately before
      they drew conclusions from the experience of the years 1848-51.

In The Poverty of Philosophy , Marx wrote:

"The working class, in the course of development, will substitute
     for the old bourgeois society an association which will preclude
     classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political
     power groups, since the political power is precisely the official
     expression of class antagonism in bourgeois society."

      (p.182, German edition,

      1885) [1]

It is instructive to compare this general exposition of the idea
      of the state disappearing after the abolition of classes with
      the exposition contained in the Communist Manifesto ,
      written by Marx and Engels a few months later--in November
      1847, to be exact:

"... In depicting the most general phases of the development of
      the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war,
      raging within existing society up to the point where that war
      breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow
      of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the
      proletariat....

"... We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by
      the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the
      ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by
     degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all
     instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the
     proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the
     total productive forces as rapidly as possible."

      (pp.31 and 37, seventh German edition,

      1906) [2]

Here we have a formulation of one of the most remarkable and
      most important ideas of Marxism on the subject of the state,
      namely, the idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" (as
      Marx and Engels began to call it after the Paris Commune); and,
      also, a highly interesting definition of the state, which is
      also one of the "forgotten words" of Marxism: "the state, i.e.,
      the proletariat organized as the ruling class."

This definition of the state has never been explained in the
      prevailing propaganda and agitation literature of the official
      Social-Democratic parties.  More than that, it has been
      deliberately ignored, for it is absolutely irreconcilable with
      reformism, and is a slap in the face for the common opportunist
      prejudices and philistine illusions about the "peaceful
      development of democracy".

The proletariat needs the state — this is repeated by all
      the opportunists, social-chauvinists and Kautskyites, who assure
      us that this is what Marx taught.  But they “forget” to add
      that, in the first place, according to Marx, the proletariat
      needs only a state which is withering away, i.e., a state so
      constituted that it begins to wither away immediately, and
      cannot but wither away.  And, secondly, the working people need
      a "state, i.e., the proletariat organized as the ruling class".

The state is a special organization of force: it is an
      organization of violence for the suppression of some class.
      What class must the proletariat suppress? Naturally, only the
      exploiting class, i.e., the bourgeoisie.  The working people
      need the state only to suppress the resistance of the
      exploiters, and only the proletariat can direct this
      suppression, can carry it out.  For the proletariat is the only
      class that is consistently revolutionary, the only class that
      can unite all the working and exploited people in the struggle
      against the bourgeoisie, in completely removing it.

The exploiting classes need political rule to maintain
      exploitation, i.e., in the selfish interests of an insignificant
      minority against the vast majority of all people.  The exploited
      classes need political rule in order to completely abolish all
      exploitation, i.e., in the interests of the vast majority of the
      people, and against the insignificant minority consisting of the
      modern slave-owners — the landowners and capitalists.

The petty-bourgeois democrats, those sham socialists who
      replaced the class struggle by dreams of class harmony, even
      pictured the socialist transformation in a dreamy fashion —
      not as the overthrow of the rule of the exploiting class, but as
      the peaceful submission of the minority to the majority which
      has become aware of its aims.  This petty-bourgeois utopia,
      which is inseparable from the idea of the state being above
      classes, led in practice to the betrayal of the interests of the
      working classes, as was shown, for example, by the history of
      the French revolutions of 1848 and 1871, and by the experience
      of “socialist” participation in bourgeois Cabinets in Britain,
      France, Italy and other countries at the turn of the century.

All his life Marx fought against this petty-bourgeois socialism,
      now revived in Russia by the Socialist-Revolutionary and
      Menshevik parties.  He developed his theory of the class
      struggle consistently, down to the theory of political power, of
      the state.

The overthrow of bourgeois rule can be accomplished only by the
      proletariat, the particular class whose economic conditions of
      existence prepare it for this task and provide it with the
      possibility and the power to perform it.  While the bourgeoisie
      break up and disintegrate the peasantry and all the
      petty-bourgeois groups, they weld together, unite and organize
      the proletariat.  Only the proletariat — by virtue of the
      economic role it plays in large-scale production — is
      capable of being the leader of all the working and exploited
      people, whom the bourgeoisie exploit, oppress and crush, often
      not less but more than they do the proletarians, but who are
      incapable of waging an independent struggle for their
      emancipation.

The theory of class struggle, applied by Marx to the question of
      the state and the socialist revolution, leads as a matter of
      course to the recognition of the political rule of the
      proletariat, of its dictatorship, i.e., of undivided power
      directly backed by the armed force of the people.  The overthrow
      of the bourgeoisie can be achieved only by the proletariat
      becoming the ruling class, capable of crushing the inevitable
      and desperate resistance of the bourgeoisie, and of organizing
      all the working and exploited people for the new economic
      system.

The proletariat needs state power, a centralized organization of
      force, an organization of violence, both to crush the resistance
      of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the
      population — the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and
      semi-proletarians — in the work of organizing a socialist
      economy.

By educating the workers' party, Marxism educates the vanguard
      of the proletariat, capable of assuming power and leading the
      whole people to socialism, of directing and organizing the new
      system, of being the teacher, the guide, the leader of all the
      working and exploited people in organizing their social life
      without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie.  By
      contrast, the opportunism now prevailing trains the members of
      the workers' party to be the representatives of the better-paid
      workers, who lose touch with the masses, "get along" fairly well
      under capitalism, and sell their birthright for a mass of
      pottage, i.e., renounce their role as revolutionary leaders of
      the people against the bourgeoisie.

Marx's theory of "the state, i.e., the proletariat organized as
      the ruling class", is inseparably bound up with the whole of his
      doctrine of the revolutionary role of the proletariat in
      history.  The culmination of this rule is the proletarian
      dictatorship, the political rule of the proletariat.

But since the proletariat needs the state as a special form of
      organization of violence against the bourgeoisie, the following
      conclusion suggests itself: is it conceivable that such an
      organization can be created without first abolishing, destroying
      the state machine created by the bourgeoisie for themselves? The Communist Manifesto leads straight to this conclusion,
      and it is of this conclusion that Marx speaks when summing up
      the experience of the revolution of 1848-51.


2. The Revolution Summed Up
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Marx sums up his conclusions from the revolution of 1848-51, on the
      subject of the state we are concerned with, in the following argument
      contained in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte :

"But the revolution is throughgoing.  It is still journeying
      through purgatory.  It does its work methodically.  By December
      2, 1851 [the day of Louis Bonaparte's coup d'etat], it had
      completed one half of its preparatory work.  It is now
      completing the other half.  First it perfected the parliamentary
      power, in order to be able to overthrow it.  Now that it has
      attained this, it is perfecting the executive power, reducing it
      to its purest expression, isolating it, setting it up against
      itself as the sole object, in order to concentrate all its
      forces of destruction against it.  And when it has done this
      second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from its
      seat and exultantly exclaim: well grubbed, old mole!

"This executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and
      military organization, with its vast and ingenious state
      machinery, with a host of officials numbering half a million,
      besides an army of another half million, this appalling
      parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society and
      chokes all its pores, sprang up in the days of the absolute
      monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system, which it helped
      to hasten." The first French Revolution developed
      centralization, "but at the same time" it increased "the extent,
      the attributes and the number of agents of governmental power.
      Napoleon completed this state machinery".  The legitimate
      monarchy and the July monarchy "added nothing but a greater
      division of labor"....

"... Finally, in its struggle against the revolution, the
      parliamentary republic found itself compelled to strengthen,
      along with repressive measures, the resources and centralization
      of governmental power.  All revolutions perfected this machine
      instead of smashing it.  The parties that contended in turn for
      domination regarded the possession of this huge state edifice as
      the principal spoils of the victor."

      ( The
	Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte pp.98-99 ,
      fourth edition, Hamburg,

      1907) [3]

In this remarkable argument, Marxism takes a tremendous step
      forward compared with the Communist Manifesto .  In the
      latter, the question of the state is still treated in an
      extremely abstract manner, in the most general terms and
      expressions.  In the above-quoted passage, the question is
      treated in a concrete manner, and the conclusion is extremely
      precise, definite, practical and palpable: all previous
      revolutions perfected the state machine, whereas it must be
      broken, smashed.

This conclusion is the chief and fundamental point in the
      Marxist theory of the state.  And it is precisely this
      fundamental point which has been completely ignored by the
      dominant official Social-Democratic parties and, indeed,
      distorted (as we shall see later) by the foremost theoretician
      of the Second International, Karl Kautsky.

The Communist Manifesto gives a general summary of
      history, which compels us to regard the state as the organ of
      class rule and leads us to the inevitable conclusion that the
      proletariat cannot overthrow the bourgeoisie without first
      winning political power, without attaining political supremacy,
      without transforming the state into the "proletariat organized
      as the ruling class"; and that this proletarian state will begin
      to wither away immediately after its victory because the state
      is unnecessary and cannot exist in a society in which there are
      no class antagonisms.  The question as to how, from the point of
      view of historical development, the replacement of the bourgeois
      by the proletarian state is to take place is not raised here.

This is the question Marx raises and answers in 1852.  True to
      his philosophy of dialectical materialism, Marx takes as his
      basis the historical experience of the great years of
      revolution, 1848 to 1851.  Here, as everywhere else, his theory
      is a summing up of experience, illuminated by a profound
      philosophical conception of the world and a rich knowledge of
      history.

The problem of the state is put specifically: How did the
      bourgeois state, the state machine necessary for the rule of the
      bourgeoisie, come into being historically? What changes did it
      undergo, what evolution did it perform in the course of
      bourgeois revolutions and in the face of the independent actions
      of the oppressed classes? What are the tasks of the proletariat
      in relation to this state machine?

The centralized state power that is peculiar to bourgeois
      society came into being in the period of the fall of absolutism.
      Two institutions most characteristic of this state machine are
      the bureaucracy and the standing army.  In their works, Marx and
      Engels repeatedly show that the bourgeoisie are connected with
      these institutions by thousands of threads.  Every worker's
      experience illustrates this connection in an extremely graphic
      and impressive manner.  From its own bitter experience, the
      working class learns to recognize this connection.  That is why
      it so easily grasps and so firmly learns the doctrine which
      shows the inevitability of this connection, a doctrine which the
      petty-bourgeois democrats either ignorantly and flippantly deny,
      or still more flippantly admit "in general", while forgetting to
      draw appropriate practical conclusions.

The bureaucracy and the standing army are a “parasite” on the
      body of bourgeois society--a parasite created by the internal
      antagonisms which rend that society, but a parasite which
      “chokes” all its vital pores.  The Kautskyite opportunism now
      prevailing in official Social-Democracy considers the view that
      the state is a parasitic organism to be the peculiar and
      exclusive attribute of anarchism.  It goes without saying that
      this distortion of Marxism is of vast advantage to those
      philistines who have reduced socialism to the unheard-of
      disgrace of justifying and prettifying the imperialist war by
      applying to it the concept of "defence of the fatherland"; but
      it is unquestionably a distortion, nevertheless.

The development, perfection, and strengthening of the
      bureaucratic and military apparatus proceeded during all the
      numerous bourgeois revolutions which Europe has witnessed since
      the fall of feudalism.  In particular, it is the petty bourgeois
      who are attracted to the side of the big bourgeoisie and are
      largely subordinated to them through this apparatus, which
      provides the upper sections of the peasants, small artisans,
      tradesmen, and the like with comparatively comfortable, quiet,
      and respectable jobs raising the holders above the people.
      Consider what happened in Russia during the six months following
      February 27, 1917.  The official posts which formerly were given
      by preference to the Black Hundreds have now become the spoils
      of the Cadets, Mensheviks, and Social-Revolutionaries.  Nobody
      has really thought of introducing any serious reforms.  Every
      effort has been made to put them off "until the Constituent
      Assembly meets", and to steadily put off its convocation until
      after the war! But there has been no delay, no waiting for the
      Constituent Assembly, in the matter of dividing the spoils of
      getting the lucrative jobs of ministers, deputy ministers,
      governors-general, etc., etc.! The game of combinations that has
      been played in forming the government has been, in essence, only
      an expression of this division and redivision of the “spoils”,
      which has been going on above and below, throughout the country,
      in every department of central and local government.  The six
      months between February 27 and August 27, 1917, can be summed
      up, objectively summed up beyond all dispute, as follows:
      reforms shelved, distribution of official jobs accomplished and
      “mistakes” in the distribution corrected by a few
      redistributions.

But the more the bureaucratic apparatus is “redistributed” among
      the various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties (among the
      Cadets, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in the case of
      Russia), the more keenly aware the oppressed classes, and the
      proletariat at their head, become of their irreconcilable
      hostility to the whole of bourgeois society.  Hence the need for
      all bourgeois parties, even for the most democratic and
      "revolutionary-democratic" among them, to intensify repressive
      measures against the revolutionary proletariat, to strengthen
      the apparatus of coercion, i.e., the state machine.  This course
      of events compels the revolution "to concentrate all its forces
      of destruction" against the state power, and to set itself the
      aim, not of improving the state machine, but of smashing and
      destroying it.

It was not logical reasoning, but actual developments, the
      actual experience of 1848-51, that led to the matter being
      presented in this way.  The extent to which Marx held strictly
      to the solid ground of historical experience can be seen from
      the fact that, in 1852, he did not yet specifically raise the
      question of what was to take the place of the state machine to
      be destroyed.  Experience had not yet provided material for
      dealing with this question, which history placed on the agenda
      later on, in 1871.  In 1852, all that could be established with
      the accuracy of scientific observation was that the proletarian
      revolution had approached the task of "concentrating all its
      forces of destruction" against the state power, of “smashing”
      the state machine.

Here the question may arise: is it correct to generalize the
      experience, observations and conclusions of Marx, to apply them
      to a field that is wider than the history of France during the
      three years 1848-51? Before proceeding to deal with this
      question, let us recall a remark made by Engels and then examine
      the facts.

      In his introduction to the third edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire ,
      Engels wrote:

"France is the country where, more than anywhere else, the
      historical class struggles were each time fought out to a
      finish, and where, consequently, the changing political forms
      within which they move and in which their results are summarized
      have been stamped in the sharpest outlines.  The centre of
      feudalism in the Middle Ages, the model country, since the
      Renaissance, of a unified monarchy based on social estates,
      France demolished feudalism in the Great Revolution and
      established the rule of the bourgeoisie in a classical purity
      unequalled by any other European land.  And the struggle of the
      upward-striving proletariat against the ruling bourgeoisie
      appeared here in an acute form unknown elsewhere."

      (p.4, 1907 edition)

The last remark is out of date insomuch as since 1871 there has
      been a lull in the revolutionary struggle of the French
      proletariat, although, long as this lull may be, it does not at
      all preclude the possibility that in the coming proletarian
      revolution France may show herself to be the classic country of
      the class struggle to a finish.

Let us, however, cast a general glance over the history of the
      advanced countries at the turn of the century.  We shall see
      that the same process went on more slowly, in more varied forms,
      in a much wider field: on the one hand, the development of
      "parliamentary power" both in the republican countries (France,
      America, Switzerland), and in the monarchies (Britain, Germany
      to a certain extent, Italy, the Scandinavia countries, etc.); on
      the other hand, a struggle for power among the various bourgeois
      and petty-bourgeois parties which distributed and redistributed
      the “spoils” of office, with the foundations of bourgeois
      society unchanged; and, lastly, the perfection and consolidation
      of the "executive power", of its bureaucratic and military
      apparatus.

There is not the slightest doubt that these features are common
      to the whole of the modern evolution of all capitalist states in
      general.  In the last three years 1848-51 France displayed, in a
      swift, sharp, concentrated form, the very same processes of
      development which are peculiar to the whole capitalist world.

Imperialism--the era of bank capital, the era of gigantic
      capitalist monopolies, of the development of monopoly capitalism
      into state-monopoly capitalism--has clearly shown an
      unprecedented growth in its bureaucratic and military apparatus
      in connection with the intensification of repressive measures
      against the proletariat both in the monarchical and in the
      freest, republican countries.

World history is now undoubtedly leading, on an incomparably larger
      scale than in 1852, to the "concentration of all the forces" of the
      proletarian revolution on the “destruction” of the state machine.

What the proletariat will put in its place is suggested by the
      highly instructive material furnished by the Paris Commune.


3. The Presentation of the Question by Marx in 1852
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


In 1907, Mehring, in the magazine Neue

	Zeit [4] (Vol.XXV,
      2, p.164), published extracts from Marx's letter to Weydemeyer
      dated March 5, 1852.  This letter, among other things, contains
      the following remarkable observation:

"And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering
      the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle
      between them.  Long before me bourgeois historians had described
      the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois
      economists, the economic anatomy of classes.  What I did that
      was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only
      bound up with the particular, historical phases in the
      development of production (historische Entwicklungsphasen der
      Produktion), (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to
      the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship
      itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all
      classes and to a classless

      society." [5]

In these words, Marx succeeded in expressing with striking
      clarity, first, the chief and radical difference between his
      theory and that of the foremost and most profound thinkers of
      the bourgeoisie; and, secondly, the essence of his theory of the
      state.

It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's
      theory is the class struggle.  But this is wrong.  And this
      wrong notion very often results in an opportunist distortion of
      Marxism and its falsification in a spirit acceptable to the
      bourgeoisie.  For the theory of the class struggle was created
      not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and, generally
      speaking, it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie.  Those who
      recognize only the class struggle are not yet Marxists; they may
      be found to be still within the bounds of bourgeois thinking and
      bourgeois politics.  To confine Marxism to the theory of the
      class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing
      it to something acceptable to the bourgeoisie.  Only he is a
      Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the
      recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat.  That is
      what constitutes the most profound distinction between the
      Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois.  This
      is the touchstone on which the real understanding and
      recognition of Marxism should be tested.  And it is not
      surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working
      class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not
      only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the
      Kautskyites (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism)
      proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats
      repudiating the dictatorship of the proletariat.  Kautsky's
      pamphlet, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat ,
      published in August 1918, i.e., long after the first edition of
      the present book, is a perfect example of petty-bourgeois
      distortion of Marxism and base renunciation of it in deeds,
      while hypocritically recognizing it in words (see my pamphlet, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky ,
      Petrograd and Moscow, 1918).

Opportunism today, as represented by its principal spokesman,
      the ex-Marxist Karl Kautsky, fits in completely with Marx's
      characterization of the bourgeois position quoted above, for
      this opportunism limits recognition of the class struggle to the
      sphere of bourgeois relations.  (Within this sphere, within its
      framework, not a single educated liberal will refuse to
      recognize the class struggle "in principle"!) Opportunism does
      not extend recognition of the class struggle to the cardinal
      point, to the period of transition from capitalism to communism,
      of the overthrow and the complete abolition of the bourgeoisie.
      In reality, this period inevitably is a period of an
      unprecedently violent class struggle in unprecedentedly acute
      forms, and, consequently, during this period the state must
      inevitably be a state that is democratic in a new way (for the
      proletariat and the propertyless in general) and dictatorial in
      a new way (against the bourgeoisie).

Further.  The essence of Marx's theory of the state has been
      mastered only by those who realize that the dictatorship of a
      single class is necessary not only for every class society in
      general, not only for the proletariat which has overthrown the
      bourgeoisie, but also for the entire historical period which
      separates capitalism from "classless society", from communism.
      Bourgeois states are most varied in form, but their essence is
      the same: all these states, whatever their form, in the final
      analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
      The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound
      to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms,
      but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of
      the proletariat.


------------------------------------------------------------
Endnotes
------------------------------------------------------------


[1] See Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Moscow, 1973, p. 151.

[2] See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 1,
      Moscow, 1973, pp. 118-19 and 126.

[3] See Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Karl Marx and
      Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, Moscow, 1973, p. 477).

Further below, on pp. 414-15 of this volume, Lenin is quoting from Engels's
      preface to the third edition of the work (op. cit., p. 396).

[4] Die Neue Zeit (New Times)--theoretical journal of the German
      Social-Democratic Party, published in Stuttgart from 1883 to 1923. It was
      edited by Karl Kautsky till October 1917 and by Heinrich Cunow in the
      subsequent period. It published some of Marx's and Engels's writings for the
      first time. Engels offered advice to its editors and often criticised them
      for departures from Marxism.

In the second half of the nineties, upon Engels's death, the journal began
      systematically to publish revisionist articles,
      including a serial by Bernstein entitled "Problems of Socialism". which
      initiated a revisionist campaign against Marxism. During the First World War
      the journal adhered to a Centrist position, and virtually hacked the
      social-chauvinists.

[5] See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow,
      1965, p. tb').


What Made the Communards' Attempt Heroic? What is to Replace the Smashed State Machine? Abolition of Parliamentarism Organisation of National Unity Abolition of the Parasite State


1. What Made the Communards' Attempt Heroic?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


It is well known that in the autumn of 1870, a few months before
      the Commune, Marx warned the Paris workers that any attempt to
      overthrow the government would be the folly of despair.  But
      when, in March 1871, a decisive battle was forced upon the
      workers and they accepted it, when the uprising had become a
      fact, Marx greeted the proletarian revolution with the greatest
      enthusiasm, in spite of unfavorable auguries.  Marx did not
      persist in the pedantic attitude of condemning an “untimely”
      movement as did the ill-famed Russian renegade from marxism,
      Plekhanov, who in November 1905 wrote encouragingly about the
      workers' and peasants' struggle, but after December 1905 cried,
      liberal fashion: "They should not have taken up arms."

Marx, however, was not only enthusiastic about the heroism of
      the Communards, who, as he expressed it, "stormed heaven".
      Although the mass revolutionary movement did not achieve its
      aim, he regarded it as a historic experience of enormous
      importance, as a certain advance of the world proletarian
      revolution, as a practical step that was more important than
      hundreds of programmes and arguments.  Marx endeavored to
      analyze this experiment, to draw tactical lessons from it and
      re-examine his theory in the light of it.

The only “correction” Marx thought it necessary to make to the Communist
      Manifesto he made on the basis of the revolutionary
      experience of the Paris Commune.

The last
	     preface to the new German edition of the Communist Manifesto , signed by both its authors,
	     is dated June 24, 1872.  In this preface the authors,
	     Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, say that the programme of
	     the Communist Manifesto "has in some details
	     become out-of-date", and the go on to say:

"... One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that
      'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state
      machinery and wield it for its own

      purposes'...." [1]

The authors took the words that are in single quotation marks in this
      passage from Marx's book, The Civil War in France .

Thus, Marx and Engels regarded one principal and fundamental lesson of
      the Paris Commune as being of such enormous importance that they
      introduced it as an important correction into the Communist Manifesto .

Most characteristically, it is this important correction that has been
      distorted by the opportunists, and its meaning probably is not known
      to nine-tenths, if not ninety-nine-hundredths, of the readers of the Communist Manifesto .  We shall deal with this distortion more
      fully farther on, in a chapter devoted specially to distortions.  Here
      it will be sufficient to note that the current, vulgar
      “interpretation” of Marx's famous statement just quoted is that Marx
      here allegedly emphasizes the idea of slow development in
      contradistinction to the seizure of power, and so on.

As a matter of fact, the exact opposite is the case.  Marx's idea is
      that the working class must break up, smash the "ready-made state
      machinery", and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.

On April 12, 1871, i.e., just at the time of the Commune, Marx wrote
      to

	Kugelmann :

"If you look up the last
      chapter of my Eighteenth
      Brumaire , you

      will find that I declare that the next attempt of the French
      Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the
      bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it [Marx's italics--the original is zerbrechen ], and
      this is the precondition for every real people's revolution on the
      Continent.  And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are
      attempting."

      ( Neue Zeit , Vol.XX, 1, 1901-02, p.

      709.) [2] (The letters of Marx to Kugelmann have appeared in
      Russian in no less than two editions, one of which
      I edited and supplied with a preface.)

The words, "to smash the bureaucratic-military machine", briefly
      express the principal lesson of Marxism regarding the tasks of
      the proletariat during a revolution in relation to the state.
      And this is the lesson that has been not only completely
      ignored, but positively distorted by the prevailing, Kautskyite,
      “interpretation” of Marxism!

As for Marx's reference to The Eighteenth Brumaire , we
      have quoted the relevant passage in full above.

It is interesting to note, in particular, two points in the
      above-quoted argument of Marx.  First, he restricts his
      conclusion to the Continent.  This was understandable in 1871,
      when Britain was still the model of a purely capitalist country,
      but without a militarist clique and, to a considerable degree,
      without a bureaucracy.  Marx therefore excluded Britain, where a
      revolution, even a people's revolution, then seemed possible,
      and indeed was possible, without the precondition of
      destroying "ready-made state machinery".

Today, in 1917, at the time of the first great imperialist war,
      this restriction made by Marx is no longer valid.  Both Britain
      and America, the biggest and the last representatives — in
      the whole world — of Anglo-Saxon “liberty”, in the sense
      that they had no militarist cliques and bureaucracy, have
      completely sunk into the all-European filthy, bloody morass of
      bureaucratic-military institutions which subordinate everything
      to themselves, and suppress everything.  Today, in Britain and
      America, too, "the precondition for every real people's
      revolution" is the smashing , the destruction of the "ready-made state machinery" (made and brought up to the
      “European”, general imperialist, perfection in those countries
      in the years 1914-17).

Secondly, particular attention should be paid to Marx's
      extremely profound remark that the destruction of the
      bureaucratic-military state machine is "the precondition for
      every real people's revolution".  This idea of a
      "people's" revolution seems strange coming from Marx, so that the
      Russian Plekhanovites and Mensheviks, those followers of Struve
      who wish to be regarded as Marxists, might possibly declare such
      an expression to be a "slip of the pen" on Marx's part.  They
      have reduced Marxism to such a state of wretchedly liberal
      distortion that nothing exists for them beyond the antithesis
      between bourgeois revolution and proletarian revolution, and
      even this antithesis they interpret in an utterly lifeless way.

If we take the revolutions of the 20th century as examples we
      shall, of course, have to admit that the Portuguese and the
      Turkish revolutions are both bourgeois revolutions.  Neither of
      them, however, is a "people's" revolution, since in neither does
      the mass of the people, their vast majority, come out actively,
      independently, with their own economic and political demands to
      any noticeable degree.  By contrast, although the Russian
      bourgeois revolution of 1905-07 displayed no such “brilliant”
      successes as at time fell to the Portuguese and Turkish
      revolutions, it was undoubtedly a "real people's" revolution,
      since the mass of the

      people, their majority, the very lowest social groups, crushed
      by oppression and exploitation, rose independently and stamped
      on the entire course of the revolution the imprint of their own demands, their attempt to build in
      their own way a new society in place of the old society that was
      being destroyed.

In Europe, in 1871, the proletariat did not constitute the
      majority of the people in any country on the Continent.  A
      "people's" revolution, one actually sweeping the majority into
      its stream, could be such only if it embraced both the
      proletariat and the peasants.  These two classes then
      constituted the “people”.  These two classes are united by the
      fact that the "bureaucratic-military state machine" oppresses,
      crushes, exploits them.  To smash this machine, to
      break it up , is truly in the interest of the “people”, of
      their majority, of the workers and most of the peasants, is "the
      precondition" for a free alliance of the poor peasant and the
      proletarians, whereas without such an alliance democracy is
      unstable and socialist transformation is impossible.

As is well known, the Paris Commune was actually working its way toward
      such an alliance, although it did not reach its goal owing to a number
      of circumstances, internal and external.

Consequently, in speaking of a "real people's revolution", Marx,
      without in the least discounting the special features of the
      petty bourgeois (he spoke a great deal about them and often),
      took strict account of the actual balance of class forces in
      most of the continental countries of Europe in 1871.  On the
      other hand, he stated that the “smashing” of the state machine
      was required by the interests of both the workers and the
      peasants, that it united them, that it placed before them the
      common task of removing the “parasite” and of replacing it by
      something new.

By what exactly?


2. What is to Replace the Smashed State Machine?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


In 1847, in the Communist Manifesto , Marx's answer to
      this question was as yet a purely abstract one; to be exact, it
      was an answer that indicated the tasks, but not the ways of
      accomplishing them.  The answer given in the Communist
      Manifesto was that this machine was to be replaced by "the
      proletariat organized as the ruling class", by the "winning of
      the battle of democracy".

Marx did not indulge in utopias; he expected the experience of the mass movement to provide the reply to
      the question as to the specific forms this organisation of the
      proletariat as the ruling class would assume and as to the exact
      manner in which this organisation would be combined with the
      most complete, most consistent "winning of the battle of
      democracy."

Marx subjected the experience of the Commune, meagre as it was,
      to the most careful analysis in The
      Civil War in France .  Let us quote the most important
      passages of this work. [All the following
      quotes in this Chapter, with one exception, are so citied -
      Ed.]

Originating from the Middle Ages, there developed in the 19th
      century "the centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs
      of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature."
      With the development of class antagonisms between capital and
      labor, "state power assumed more and more the character of a
      public force organized for the suppression of the working class,
      of a machine of class rule.  After every revolution, which marks
      an advance in the class struggle, the purely coercive character
      of the state power stands out in bolder and bolder relief."
      After the revolution of 1848-49, state power became "the
      national war instruments of capital against labor".  The Second
      Empire consolidated this.

"The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune." It was the
      "specific form" of "a republic that was not only to remove the
      monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself."

What was this “specific” form of the proletarian, socialist republic?
      What was the state it began to create?

"The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of
      the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed
      people."

This demand now figures in the programme of every party calling
      itself socialist.  The real worth of their programme, however,
      is best shown by the behavior of our Social-Revolutionists and
      mensheviks, who, right after the revolution of February 27,
      refused to carry out this demand!

"The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by
      universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible
      and revocable at any time.  The majority of its members were
      naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the
      working class.... The police, which until then had been the
      instrument of the Government, was at once stripped of its
      political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at
      all times revocable, agent of the Commune.  So were the
      officials of all other branches of the administration.  From the
      members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be
      done at workmen's wages .  The privileges and the
      representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state
      disappeared along with the high dignitaries
      themselves.... Having once got rid of the standing army and the
      police, the instruments of physical force of the old government,
      the Commune proceeded at once to break the instrument of
      spiritual suppression, the power of the priests....  The
      judicial functionaries lost that sham independence...  they were
      thenceforward to be elective, responsible, and

      revocable." [3]

The Commune, therefore, appears to have replaced the smashed
      state machine “only” by fuller democracy: abolition of the
      standing army; all officials to be elected and subject to
      recall.  But as a matter of fact this “only” signifies a
      gigantic replacement of certain institutions by other
      institutions of a fundamentally different type.  This is exactly
      a case of "quantity being transformed into quality": democracy,
      introduced as fully and consistently as is at all conceivable,
      is transformed from bourgeois into proletarian democracy; from
      the state (= a special force for the suppression of a particular
      class) into something which is no longer the state proper.

It is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush
      their resistance.  This was particularly necessary for the
      Commune; and one of the reasons for its defeat was that it did
      not do this with sufficient determination.  The organ of
      suppression, however, is here the majority of the population,
      and not a minority, as was always the case under slavery,
      serfdom, and wage slavery.  And since the majority of people
      itself suppresses its oppressors, a 'special force" for
      suppression is no longer necessary! In this sense, the state
      begins to wither away.  Instead of the special institutions of a
      privileged minority (privileged officialdom, the chiefs of the
      standing army), the majority itself can directly fulfil all
      these functions, and the more the functions of state power are
      performed by the people as a whole, the less need there is for
      the existence of this power.

In this connection, the following measures of the Commune,
      emphasized by Marx, are particularly noteworthy: the abolition
      of all representation allowances, and of all monetary privileges
      to officials, the reduction of the remuneration of all servants
      of the state to the level of "workmen's wages".  This shows more
      clearly than anything else the turn from bourgeois to
      proletarian democracy, from the democracy of the oppressors to
      that of the oppressed classes, from the state as a "special
      force" for the suppression of a particular class to the
      suppression of the oppressors by the general force of the
      majority of the people--the workers and the peasants.  And it
      is on this particularly striking point, perhaps the most
      important as far as the problem of the state is concerned, that
      the ideas of Marx have been most completely ignored! In popular
      commentaries, the number of which is legion, this is not
      mentioned.  The thing done is to keep silent about it as if it
      were a piece of old-fashioned “naivete”, just as Christians,
      after their religion had been given the status of state
      religion, “forgot” the “naivete” of primitive Christianity with
      its democratic revolutionary spirit.

The reduction of the remuneration of high state officials seem
      “simply” a demand of naive, primitive democracy.  One of the
      “founders” of modern opportunism, the ex-Social-Democrat Eduard
      Bernstein, has more than once repeated the vulgar bourgeois
      jeers at “primitive” democracy.  Like all opportunists, and like
      the present Kautskyites, he did not understand at all that,
      first of all, the transition from capitalism to socialism is
      impossible without a certain “reversion” to “primitive”
      democracy (for how else can the majority, and then the whole
      population without exception, proceed to discharge state
      functions?); and that, secondly, "primitive democracy" based on
      capitalism and capitalist culture is not the same as primitive
      democracy in prehistoric or precapitalist times.  Capitalist
      culture has created large-scale production, factories, railways,
      the postal service, telephones, etc., and on this basis the
      great majority of the functions of the old "state power" have
      become so simplified and can be reduced to such exceedingly
      simple operations of registration, filing, and checking that
      they can be easily performed by every literate person, can quite
      easily be performed for ordinary "workmen's wages", and that
      these functions can (and must) be stripped of every shadow of
      privilege, of every semblance of "official grandeur".

All officials, without exception, elected and subject to recall
      at any time, their salaries reduced to the level of ordinary
      "workmen's wages" — these simple and "self-evident"
      democratic measures, while completely uniting the interests of
      the workers and the majority of the peasants, at the same time
      serve as a bridge leading from capitalism to socialism.  These
      measures concern the reorganization of the state, the purely
      political reorganization of society; but, of course, they
      acquire their full meaning and significance only in connection
      with the "expropriation of the expropriators" either bring
      accomplished or in preparation, i.e., with the transformation of
      capitalist private ownership of the means of production into
      social ownership.

"The Commune," Marx wrote, "made the catchword of all bourgeois
      revolutions, cheap government, a reality, by abolishing the two
      greatest sources of expenditure--the army and the officialdom."

From the peasants, as from other sections of the petty
      bourgeoisie, only an insignificant few "rise to the top", "get
      on in the world" in the bourgeois sense, i.e., become either
      well-to-do, bourgeois, or officials in secure and privileged
      positions.  In every capitalist country where there are peasants
      (as there are in most capitalist countries), the vast majority
      of them are oppressed by the government and long for its
      overthrow, long for “cheap” government.  This can be achieved
      only by the proletariat; and by achieving it, the proletariat at
      the same time takes a step towards the socialist reorganization
      of the state.


3. Abolition of Parliamentarism
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


"The Commune," Marx wrote, "was to be a working, not a
      parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same
      time....

"Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of
      the ruling class was to represent and repress [ver- and zertreten]
      the people in parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the
      people constituted in communes, as individual suffrage serves every
      other employer in the search for workers, foremen and accountants
      for his business."

Owing to the prevalence of social-chauvinism and opportunism,
      this remarkable criticism of parliamentarism, made in 1871, also
      belongs now to the "forgotten words" of Marxism.  The
      professional Cabinet Ministers and parliamentarians, the
      traitors to the proletariat and the “practical” socialists of
      our day, have left all criticism of parliamentarism to the
      anarchists, and, on this wonderfully reasonable ground, they
      denounce all criticism of parliamentarism as “anarchism”!!  It
      is not surprising that the proletariat of the “advanced”
      parliamentary countries, disgusted with such “socialists” as the
      Scheidemanns, Davids, Legiens, Sembats, Renaudels, Hendersons,
      Vanderveldes, Staunings, Brantings, Bissolatis, and Co., has
      been with increasing frequency giving its sympathies to
      anarcho-syndicalism, in spite of the fact that the latter is
      merely the twin brother of opportunism.

For Marx, however, revolutionary dialectics was never the empty
      fashionable phrase, the toy rattle, which Plekhanov, Kautsky and
      others have made of it.  Marx knew how to break with anarchism
      ruthlessly for its inability to make use even of the “pigsty” of
      bourgeois parliamentarism, especially when the situation was
      obviously not revolutionary; but at the same time he knew how to
      subject parliamentarism to genuinely revolutionary proletarian
      criticism.

To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class
      is to repress and crush the people through parliament--this is
      the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in
      parliamentary- constitutional monarchies, but also in the most
      democratic republics.

But if we deal with the question of the state, and if we
      consider parliamentarism as one of the institutions of the
      state, from the point of view of the tasks of the proletariat in
      this field, what is the way out of parliamentarism? How can it
      be dispensed with?

Once again, we must say: the lessons of Marx, based on the study
      of the Commune, have been so completely forgotten that the
      present-day "Social-Democrat" (i.e., present-day traitor to
      socialism) really cannot understand any criticism of
      parliamentarism other than anarchist or reactionary criticism.

The way out of parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition
      of representative institutions and the elective principle, but
      the conversion of the representative institutions from talking
      shops into “working” bodies.  "The Commune was to be a working,
      not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same
      time."

"A working, not a parliamentary body"--this is a blow straight
      from the shoulder at the present-day parliamentarian country,
      from America to Switzerland, from France to Britain, Norway and
      so forth--in these countries the real business of “state” is
      performed behind the scenes and is carried on by the
      departments, chancelleries, and General Staffs.  parliament is
      given up to talk for the special purpose of fooling the "common
      people".  This is so true that even in the Russian republic, a
      bourgeois-democratic republic, all these sins of parliamentarism
      came out at once, even before it managed to set up a real
      parliament.  The heroes of rotten philistinism, such as the
      skobelevs and tseretelis, the Chernovs and Avksentyevs, have
      even succeeded in polluting the Soviets after the fashion of the
      most disgusting bourgeois parliamentarism, in converting them
      into mere talking shops.  In the Soviets, the “socialist”
      Ministers are fooling the credulous rustics with
      phrase-mongering and resolutions.  In the government itself a
      sort of permanent shuffle is going on in order that, on the one
      hand, as many Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks as
      possible may in turn get near the “pie”, the lucrative and
      honorable posts, and that, on the other hand, the “attention” of
      the people may be “engaged”.  meanwhile the chancelleries and
      army staffs “do” the business of “state”.

Dyelo Naroda , the organ of the ruling
      Socialist-Revolutionary Party, recently admitted in a leading
      article--with the matchless frankness of people of "good
      society", in which “all” are engaged in political prostitution -
      that even in the ministeries headed by the “socialists” (save
      the mark!), the whole bureaucratic apparatus is in fact
      unchanged, is working in the old way and quite “freely”
      sabotaging revolutionary measures! Even without this admission,
      does not the actual history of the participation of the
      Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in the government prove
      this? It is noteworthy, however, that in the ministerial company
      of the Cadets, the Chernovs, Rusanovs, Zenzinovs, and other
      editors of Dyelo Naroda have so completely lost all
      sense of shame as to brazenly assert, as if it were a mere
      bagetelle, that in “their” ministeries everything is unchanged!!
      Revolutionary-democratic phrases to gull the rural Simple
      Simons, and bureaucracy and red tape to "gladden the hearts" of
      the capitalists--that is the essence of the “honest” coalition.

The Commune substitutes for the venal and rotten parliamentarism
      of bourgeois society institutions in which freedom of opinion
      and discussion does not degenerate into deception, for the
      parliamentarians themselves have to work, have to execute their
      own laws, have themselves to test the results achieved in
      reality, and to account directly to their constituents.
      Representative institutions remain, but there is no
      parliamentarism here as a special system, as the division of
      labor between the legislative and the executive, as a privileged
      position for the deputies.  We cannot imagine democracy, even
      proletarian democracy, without representative institutions, but
      we can and must imagine democracy without parliamentarism, if
      criticism of bourgeois society is not mere words for us, if the
      desire to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie is our earnest
      and sincere desire, and not a mere “election” cry for catching
      workers' votes, as it is with the Mensheviks and
      Socialist-Revolutionaries, and also the Scheidemanns and
      Legiens, the Smblats and Vanderveldes.

It is extremely instructive to note that, in speaking of the
      function of those officials who are necessary for the Commune
      and for proletarian democracy, Marx compares them to the workers
      of "every other employer", that is, of the ordinary capitalist
      enterprise, with its "workers, foremen, and accountants".

There is no trace of utopianism in Marx, in the sense that he
      made up or invented a “new” society.  No, he studied the birth
      of the new society out of the old, and the forms of transition
      from the latter to the former, as a mass proletarian movement
      and tried to draw practical lessons from it.  He “Learned” from
      the Commune, just as all the great revolutionary thinkers
      learned unhesitatingly from the experience of great movements of
      the oppressed classes, and never addressed them with pedantic
      “homilies” (such as Plekhanov's: "They should not have taken up
      arms" or Tsereteli's: "A class must limit itself").

Abolishing the bureaucracy at once, everywhere and completely,
      is out of the question.  It is a utopia.  But to smash the old
      bureaucratic machine at once and to begin immediately to
      construct a new one that will make possible the gradual
      abolition of all bureaucracy--this is not a utopia, it is the
      experience of the Commune, the direct and immediate task of the
      revolutionary proletariat.

Capitalism simplifies the functions of “state” administration;
      it makes it possible to cast “bossing” aside and to confine the
      whole matter to the organization of the proletarians (as the
      ruling class), which will hire "workers, foremen and
      accountants" in the name of the whole of society.

We are not utopians, we do not “dream” of dispensing at once
      with all administration, with all subordination.  These
      anarchist dreams, based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the
      proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism, and, as
      a matter of fact, serve only to postpone the socialist
      revolution until people are different.  No, we want the
      socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people
      who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and "foremen
      and accountants".

The subordination, however, must be to the armed vanguard of all
      the exploited and working people, i.e., to the proletariat.  A
      beginning can and must be made at once, overnight, to replace
      the specific “bossing” of state officials by the simple
      functions of "foremen and accountants", functions which are
      already fully within the ability of the average town dweller and
      can well be performed for "workmen's wages".

We , the workers, shall organize large-scale production
      on the basis of what capitalism has already created, relying on
      our own experience as workers, establishing strict, iron
      discipline backed up by the state power of the armed workers.
      We shall reduce the role of state officials to that of simply
      carrying out our instructions as responsible, revocable,
      modestly paid "foremen and accountants" (of course, with the aid
      of technicians of all sorts, types and degrees).  This is our
      proletarian task, this is what we can and must start with in
      accomplishing the proletarian revolution.  Such a beginning, on
      the basis of large-scale production, will of itself lead to the
      gradual "withering away" of all bureaucracy, to the gradual
      creation of an order--an order without inverted commas, an
      order bearing no similarity to wage slavery--an order under
      which the functions of control and accounting, becoming more and
      more simple, will be performed by each in turn, will then become
      a habit and will finally die out as the special functions of a
      special section of the population.

A witty German Social-Democrat of the seventies of the last
      century called the postal service an example of the socialist
      economic system.  This is very true.  At the present the postal
      service is a business organized on the lines of state-capitalist
      monopoly.  Imperialism is gradually transforming all trusts into
      organizations of a similar type, in which, standing over the
      “common” people, who are overworked and starved, one has the
      same bourgeois bureaucracy.  But the mechanism of social
      management is here already to hand.  Once we have overthrown the
      capitalists, crushed the resistance of these exploiters with the
      iron hand of the armed workers, and smashed the bureaucratic
      machinery of the modern state, we shall have a
      splendidly-equipped mechanism, freed from the “parasite”, a
      mechanism which can very well be set going by the united workers
      themselves, who will hire technicians, foremen and accountants,
      and pay them all, as indeed all “state” officials in general,
      workmen's wages.  Here is a concrete, practical task which can
      immediately be fulfilled in relation to all trusts, a task whose
      fulfilment will rid the working people of exploitation, a task
      which takes account of what the Commune had already begun to
      practice (particularly in building up the state).

To organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service
      so that the technicians, foremen and accountants, as well as all
      officials, shall receive salaries no higher than "a workman's
      wage", all under the control and leadership of the armed
      proletariat--that is our immediate aim.  This is what will
      bring about the abolition of parliamentarism and the
      preservation of representative institutions.  This is what will
      rid the laboring classes of the bourgeoisie's prostitution of
      these institutions.


4. Organisation of National Unity
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


"In a brief sketch of national organization which the Commune
      had no time to develop, it states explicitly that the Commune
      was to be the political form of even the smallest village...."
      The communes were to elect the "National Delegation" in Paris.

"... The few but important functions which would still remain
      for a central government were not to to be suppressed, as had
      been deliberately mis-stated, but were to be transferred to
      communal, i.e., strictly responsible, officials.

"... National unity was not to be broken, but, on the contrary,
      organized by the communal constitution; it was to become a
      reality by the destruction of state power which posed as the
      embodiment of that unity yet wanted to be independent of, and
      superior to, the nation, on whose body it was but a parasitic
      excrescence.  While the merely repressive organs of the old
      governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate
      functions were to be wrested from an authority claiming the
      right to stand above society, and restored to the responsible
      servants of society."

The extent to which the opportunists of present-day
      Social-Democracy have failed--perhaps it would be more true to
      say, have refused--to understand these observations of Marx is
      best shown by that book of Herostratean fame of the renegade
      Bernstein, The Premises of Socialism and the Tasks of the
      Social-Democrats .  It is in connection with the above
      passage from Marx that Bernstein wrote that

      "as far as its political content", this programme "displays, in
      all its essential features, the greatest similarity to the
      federalism of Proudhon....  In spite of all the other points of
      difference between Marx and the 'petty-bourgeois' Proudhon
      [Bernstein places the word "petty-bourgeois" in inverted commas,
      to make it sound ironical] on these points, their lines of
      reasoning run as close as could be."

      Of course, Bernstein
      continues, the importance of the municipalities is growing, but

      "it seems doubtful to me whether the first job of democracy
      would be such a dissolution [Auflosung] of the modern states and
      such a complete transformation [Umwandlung] of their
      organization as is visualized by Marx and Proudhon (the
      formation of a National Assembly from delegates of the
      provincial of district assemblies, which, in their turn, would
      consist of delegates from the communes), so that consequently
      the previous mode of national representation would disappear."

      (Bernstein, Premises , German edition, 1899, pp.134 and 136)

To confuse Marx's view on the "destruction of state power, a
      parasitic excrescence", with Proudhon's federalism is positively
      monstrous! But it is no accident, for it never occurs to the
      opportunist that Marx does not speak here at all about
      federalism as opposed to centralism, but about smashing the old,
      bourgeois state machine which exists in all bourgeois countries.

The only thing that does occur to the opportunist is what he
      sees around him, in an environment of petty-bourgeois
      philistinism and “reformists” stagnation, namely, only
      “municipalities”! The opportunist has even grown out of the
      habit of thinking about proletarian revolution.

It is ridiculous.  But the remarkable thing is that nobody
      argued with Bernstein on this point.  Bernstein has been refuted
      by many, especially by Plekhanov in Russian literature and by
      Kautsky in European literature, but neither of them has said
      anything about this distortion of Marx by Bernstein.

The opportunist has so much forgotten how to think in a
      revolutionary way and to dwell on revolution that he attributes
      “federalism” to Marx, whom he confuses with the founder of
      anarchism, Proudhon.  As for Kautsky and Plekhanov, who claim to
      be orthodox Marxists and defenders of the theory of
      revolutionary Marxism, they are silent on this point!  Here is
      one of the roots of the extreme vulgarization of the views on
      the difference between Marxism and anarchism, which is
      characteristic of both the Kautskyites and the opportunists, and
      which we shall discuss again later.

There is not a trace of federalism in Marx's above-quoted
      observation on the experience of the Commune.  Marx agreed with
      Proudhon on the very point that the opportunist Bernstein did
      not see.  Marx disagreed with Proudhon on the very point on
      which Bernstein found a similarity between them.

Marx agreed with Proudhon in that they both stood for the
      “smashing” of the modern state machine.  Neither the
      opportunists nor the Kautskyites wish to see the similarity of
      views on this point between Marxism and anarchism (both Proudhon
      and Bakunin) because this is where they have departed from
      Marxism.

Marx disagreed both with Proudhon and Bakunin precisely on the
      question of federalism (not to mention the dictatorship of the
      proletariat).  Federalism as a principle follows logically from
      the petty-bourgeois views of anarchism.  Marx was a centralist.
      There is no departure whatever from centralism in his
      observations just quoted.  Only those who are imbued with the
      philistine "superstitious belief" in the state can mistake the
      destruction of the bourgeois state machine for the destruction
      of centralism!

Now if the proletariat and the poor peasants take state power
      into their own hands, organize themselves quite freely in
      communes, and unite the action of all the communes in striking
      at capital, in crushing the resistance of the capitalists, and
      in transferring the privately-owned railways, factories, land
      and so on to the entire nation, to the whole of society, won't
      that be centralism?  Won't that be the most consistent
      democratic centralism and, moreover, proletarian centralism?

Bernstein simply cannot conceive of the possibility of voluntary
      centralism, of the voluntary fusion of the proletarian communes,
      for the sole purpose of destroying bourgeois rule and the
      bourgeois state machine.  Like all philistines, Bernstein
      pictures centralism as something which can be imposed and
      maintained solely from above, and solely by the bureaucracy and
      military clique.

As though foreseeing that his views might be distorted, Marx
      expressly emphasized that the charge that the Commune had wanted
      to destroy national unity, to abolish the central authority, was
      a deliberate fraud.  Marx purposely used the words: "National
      unity was...  to be organized", so as to oppose conscious,
      democratic, proletarian centralism to bourgeois, military,
      bureaucratic centralism.

But there are none so deaf as those who will not hear.  And the
      very thing the opportunists of present-day Social-Democracy do
      not want to hear about it the destruction of state power, the
      amputation of the parasitic excrescence.


5. Abolition of the Parasite State
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


We have already quoted Marx's words on the subject, and we must now
      supplement them.

"It is generally the fate of new historical creations," he
      wrote, "to be mistaken for the counterpart of older and even
      defunct forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain
      likeness.  Thus, this new Commune, which breaks [bricht,
      smashes] the modern state power, has been regarded as a revival
      of the medieval communes...  as a federation of small states (as
      Montesquieu and the

      Girondins [4] visualized it)...  as an
      exaggerated form of the old struggle against
      overcentralization....

"... The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social
      body all the forces hitherto absorbed by that parasitic
      excrescence, the 'state', feeding upon and hampering the free
      movement of society.  By this one act it would have initiated
      the regeneration of France....

"... The Communal Constitution would have brought the rural
      producers under the intellectual lead of the central towns of
      their districts, and there secured to them, in the town working
      men, the natural trustees of their interests.  The very
      existence of the Commune involved, as a matter of course, local
      self-government, but no longer as a counterpoise to state power,
      now become superfluous."

"Breaking state power", which as a "parasitic excrescence"; its
      “amputation”, its “smashing”; "state power, now become
      superfluous"--these are the expressions Marx used in regard to
      the state when appraising and analyzing the experience of the
      Commune.

All this was written a little less than half a century ago; and
      now one has to engage in excavations, as it were, in order to
      bring undistorted Marxism to the knowledge of the mass of the
      people.  The conclusions drawn from the observation of the last
      great revolution which Marx lived through were forgotten just
      when the time for the next great proletarian revolution has
      arrived.

"... The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune
      has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which
      expressed themselves in it show that it was a thoroughly
      flexible political form, while all previous forms of government
      had been essentially repressive.  Its true secret was this: it
      was essentially a working-class government, the result of the
      struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the
      political form at last discovered under which the economic
      emancipation of labor could be accomplished....

"Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would
      have been an impossibility and a delusion...."

The utopians busied themselves with “discovering” political
      forms under which the socialist transformation of society was to
      take place.  The anarchists dismissed the question of political
      forms altogether.  The opportunists of present-day
      Social-Democracy accepted the bourgeois political forms of the
      parliamentary democratic state as the limit which should not be
      overstepped; they battered their foreheads praying before this
      “model”, and denounced as anarchism every desire to break these
      forms.

Marx deduced from the whole history of socialism and the
      political struggle that the state was bound to disappear, and
      that the transitional form of its disappearance (the transition
      from state to non-state) would be the "proletariat organized as
      the ruling class".  Marx, however, did not set out to discover
      the political forms of this future stage.  He limited himself to
      carefully observing French history, to analyzing it, and to
      drawing the conclusion to which the year 1851 had led, namely,
      that matters were moving towards destruction of the bourgeois
      state machine.

And when the mass revolutionary movement of the proletariat burst forth,
      Marx, in spite of its failure, in spite of its short life and patent
      weakness, began to study the forms it had discovered.

The Commune is the form "at last discovered" by the proletarian
      revolution, under which the economic emancipation of labor can take
      place.

The Commune is the first attempt by a proletarian revolution to
      smash the bourgeois state machine; and it is the political form
      "at last discovered", by which the smashed state machine can and
      must be replaced.

We shall see further on that the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917,
      in different circumstances and under different conditions, continue the
      work of the Commune and confirm Marx's brilliant historical analysis.


------------------------------------------------------------
Endnotes
------------------------------------------------------------


[1] See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 1, Moscow,
      1962, p. 22.

[2] See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence.
      Moscow, 1965, pp. 262-63.

[3] See Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
      Selected Works, Vol. 2, Moscow, 1973, pp. 217-21).

Further below, on pp. 426, 427, 432-436 of this volume, Lenin is quoting
      from the same work by Marx (op. cit., pp. 222, 220-23).

[4] The Girondists--a political grouping during the French bourgeois
      revolution of the late eighteenth century, expressed the interests of the
      moderate bourgeoisie. They wavered between revolution and
      counter-revolution, and made deals with the monarchy.


The Housing Question Controversy with the Anarchists Letter to Bebel Criticism of the Draft of the Erfurt Programme The 1891 Preface to Marx's "The Civil War in France" Engels on the Overcoming of Democracy

Marx gave the fundamentals concerning the significance of the
 experience of the Commune. Engels returned to the same subject
 time and again, and explained Marx's analysis and conclusions,
 sometimes elucidating other aspects of the question with such
 power and vividness that it is necessary to deal with his
 explanations specially.


1. The Housing Question
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


In his work, The Housing
 Question (1872), Engels already took into account the
 experience of the Commune, and dealt several times with the
 tasks of the revolution in relation to the state. It is
 interesting to note that the treatment of this specific subject
 clearly revealed, on the one hand, points of similarity between
 the proletarian state and the present state--points that
 warrant speaking of the state in both cases--and, on the other
 hand, points of difference between them, or the transition to
 the destruction of the state.

"How is the housing question to be settled then? In present-day
 society, it is settled just as any other social question: by the
 gradual economic levelling of demand and supply, a settlement
 which reproduces the question itself again and again and
 therefore is no settlement. How a social revolution would
 settle this question not only depends on the circumstances in
 each particular case, but is also connected with much more
 far-reaching questions, one of the most fundamental of which is
 the abolition of the antithesis between town and country. As it
 is not our task to create utopian systems for the organization
 of the future society, it would be more than idle to go into the
 question here. But one thing is certain: there is already a
 sufficient quantity of houses in the big cities to remedy
 immediately all real 'housing shortage', provided they are used
 judiciously. This can naturally only occur through the
 expropriation of the present owners and by quartering in their
 houses homeless workers or workers overcrowded in their present
 homes. As soon as the proletariat has won political power, such
 a measure prompted by concern for the common good will be just
 as easy to carry out as are other expropriations and billetings
 by the present-day state."

 (German edition, 1887, p.

 22) [1]

The change in the form of state power is not examined here, but
 only the content of its activity. Expropriations and billetings
 take place by order even of the present state. From the formal
 point of view, the proletarian state will also “order” the
 occupation of dwellings and expropriation of houses. But it is
 clear that the old executive apparatus, the bureaucracy, which
 is connected with the bourgeoisie, would simply be unfit to
 carry out the orders of the proletarian state.

"... It must be pointed out that the 'actual seizure' of all the
 instruments of labor, the taking possession of industry as a
 whole by the working people, is the exact opposite of the
 Proudhonist 'redemption'. In the latter case the individual
 worker becomes the owner of the dwelling, the peasant farm, the
 instruments of labor; in the former case, the 'working people'
 remain the collective owners of the houses, factories and
 instruments of labor, and will hardly permit their use, at least
 during a transitional period, by individuals or associations
 without compensation for the cost. In the same way, the
 abolition of property in land is not the abolition of ground
 rent but its transfer, if in a modified form, to society. The
 actual seizure of all the instruments of labor by the working
 people, therefore, does not at all preclude the retention of
 rent relations."

 (p.68)

We shall examine the question touched upon in this passage,
 namely, the economic basis for the withering away of the state,
 in the next chapter. Engels expresses himself most cautiously.
 saying that the proletarian state would “hardly” permit the use
 of houses without payment, "at least during a transitional
 period". The letting of houses owed [owned] by the whole people to
 individual families presupposes the collection of rent, a
 certain amount of control, and the employment of some standard in
 allotting the housing. All this calls for a certain form of
 state, but it does not at all call for a special military
 bureaucratic apparatus, with officials occupying especially
 privileged positions. The transition to a situation in which it
 will be possible to supply dwellings rent-free depends on the
 complete "withering away" of the state.

Speaking of the Blanquists' adoption of the fundamental position of
 Marxism after the Commune and under the influence of its experience,
 Engels, in passing, formulates this position as follows:

"... Necessity of political action by the proletariat and of its
 dictatorship as the transition to the abolition of classes and,
 with them, of the state...."

 (p.55)

Addicts of hair-splitting criticism, or bourgeois "exterminators
 of Marxism", will perhaps see a contradiction between this
 recognition of the "abolition of the state" and repudiation of
 this formula as an anarchist one in the above passage from Anti-Dühring .
 It would not be surprising if the opportunists classed Engels,
 too, as an “anarchist”, for it is becoming increasingly common
 with the social-chauvinists to accuse the internationalists of
 anarchism.

Marxism has always taught that with the abolition of classes the
 state will also be abolished. The well-known passage on the
 "withering away of the state in Anti-Dühring accuses the anarchists not simply of favoring the abolition of
 the state, but of preaching that the state can be abolished
 “overnight”.

As the now prevailing "Social-Democratic" doctrine completely
 distorts the relation of Marxism to anarchism on the question of
 the abolition of the state, it will be particularly useful to
 recall a certain controversy in which Marx and Engels came out
 against the anarchists.


Controversy with the Anarchists
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


This controversy took place in 1873. Marx and Engels
 contributed articles against the Proudhonists, “autonomists” or
 "anti- authoritarians", to an Italian socialist annual, and it
 was not until 1913 that these articles appeared in German in Neue

	Zeit . [2]

"If the political struggle of the working class assumes
 revolutionary form," wrote Marx, ridiculing the anarchists for
 their repudiation of politics, "and if the workers set up their
 revolutionary dictatorship in place of the dictatorship of the
 bourgeoisie, they commit the terrible crime of violating
 principles, for in order to satisfy their wretched, vulgar
 everyday needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie,
 they give the state a revolutionary and transient form, instead
 of laying down their arms and abolishing the state."

 ( Neue Zeit Vol.XXXII, 1, 1913-14, p.40)

It was solely against this kind of “abolition” of the state that
 Marx fought in refuting the anarchists! He did not at all oppose
 the view that the state would disappear when classes
 disappeared, or that it would be abolished when classes were
 abolished. What he did oppose was the proposition that the
 workers should renounce the use of arms, organized violence,
 that is, the state, which is to serve to "crush the resistance
 of the bourgeoisie".

To prevent the true meaning of his struggle against anarchism
 from being distorted, Marx expressly emphasized the
 "revolutionary and transient form" of the state which the
 proletariat needs. The proletariat needs the state only
 temporarily. We do not after all differ with the anarchists on
 the question of the abolition of the state as the aim. We
 maintain that, to achieve this aim, we must temporarily make use
 of the instruments, resources, and methods of state power
 against the exploiters, just as the temporary dictatorship of
 the oppressed class is necessary for the abolition of classes.
 Marx chooses the sharpest and clearest way of stating his case
 against the anarchists: After overthrowing the yoke of the
 capitalists, should the workers "lay down their arms", or use
 them against the capitalists in order to crush their resistance?
 But what is the systematic use of arms by one class against
 another if not a "transient form" of state?

Let every Social-Democrat ask himself: Is that how he has been
 posing the question of the state in controversy with the
 anarchists? Is that how it has been posed by the vast majority
 of the official socialist parties of the Second International?

Engels expounds the same ideas in much greater detail and still
 more popularly. First of all he ridicules the muddled ideas of
 the Proudhonists, who call themselves "anti-authoritarians",
 i.e., repudiated all authority, all subordination, all power.
 Take a factory, a railway, a ship on the high seas, said Engels:
 is it not clear that not one of these complex technical
 establishments, based on the use of machinery and the systematic
 co-operation of many people, could function without a certain
 amount of subordination and, consequently, without a certain
 amount of authority or power?

"... When I counter the most rabid anti-authoritarians with
 these arguments, they only answer they can give me is the
 following: Oh, that's true, except that here it is not a
 question of authority with which we vest our delegates, but of a
 commission! These people imagine they can change a thing by
 changing its name...."

Having thus shown that authority and autonomy are relative
 terms, that the sphere of their application varies with the
 various phases of social development, that it is absurd to take
 them as absolutes, and adding that the sphere of application of
 machinery and large-scale production is steadily expanding,
 Engels passes from the general discussion of authority to the
 question of the state.

"Had the autonomists," he wrote, "contented themselves with
 saying that the social organization of the future would allow
 authority only within the bounds which the conditions of
 production make inevitable, one could have come to terms with
 them. But they are blind to all facts that make authority
 necessary and they passionately fight the word.

"Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying
 out against political authority, the state? All socialists are
 agreed that the state, and with it political authority, will
 disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is,
 that public functions will lose their political character and
 become mere administrative functions of watching over social
 interests. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the
 political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the
 social relations that gave both to it have been destroyed. They
 demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the
 abolition of authority.

"Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is
 certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act
 whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the
 other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which
 are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must
 maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire
 in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more
 than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people
 against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it
 for having made too little use of that authority? Therefore, one
 of two things: either that anti-authoritarians don't know what
 they are talking about, in which case they are creating nothing
 but confusion. Or they do know, and in that case they are
 betraying the cause of the proletariat. In either case they
 serve only reaction."

 (p.39)

This argument touches upon questions which should be examined in
 connection with the relationship between politics and economics
 during the withering away of the state (the next chapter is
 devoted to this). These questions are: the transformation of
 public functions from political into simple functions of
 administration, and the "political state". This last term, one
 particularly liable to misunderstanding, indicates the process
 of the withering away of the state: at a certain stage of this
 process, the state which is withering away may be called a
 non-political state.

Against, the most remarkable thing in this argument of Engels'
 is the way he states his case against the anarchists.
 Social-Democrats, claiming to be disciples of Engels, have
 argued on this subject against the anarchists millions of times
 since 1873, but they have not argued as Marxists could and
 should. The anarchist idea of abolition of the state is muddled
 and non-revolutionary--that is how Engels put it. It is
 precisely the revolution in its rise and development, with its
 specific tasks in relation to violence, authority, power, the
 state, that the anarchists refuse to see.

The usual criticism of anarchism by present-day Social-Democrats
 has boiled down to the purest philistine banality: "We recognize
 the state, whereas the anarchists do not!" Naturally, such
 banality cannot but repel workers who are at all capable of
 thinking and revolutionary-minded. What Engels says is
 different. He stresses that all socialists recognize that the
 state will disappear as a result of the socialist revolution.
 He then deals specifically with the question of the revolution -
 the very question which, as a rule, the Social-Democrats evade
 out of opportunism, leaving it, so to speak, exclusively for the
 anarchists "to work out". And when dealing with this question,
 Engels takes the bull by the horns; he asks: should not the
 Commune have made more use of the revolutionary power of the
 state, that is, of the proletariat armed and organized as the
 ruling class?

Prevailing official Social-Democracy usually dismissed the
 question of the concrete tasks of the proletariat in the
 revolution either with a philistine sneer, or, at best, with the
 sophistic evasion: "The future will show". And the anarchists
 were justified in saying about such Social-Democrats that they
 were failing in their task of giving the workers a revolutionary
 education. Engels draws upon the experience of the last
 proletarian revolution precisely for the purpose of making a
 most concrete study of what should be done by the proletariat,
 and in what manner, in relation to both the banks and the state.


Letter to Bebel
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


One of the most, if not the most, remarkable observation on the
 state in the works of Marx and Engels is contained in the
 following passage in Engels' letter to Bebel dated March 18-28,
 1875. This letter, we may observe in parenthesis, was, as far
 as we know, first published by Bebel in the second volume of his
 memoirs ( Aus meinem Leben ), which appeared in 1911,
 i.e., 36 years after the letter had been written and sent.

Engels wrote to Bebel criticizing the same draft of the Gotha Programme
 which Marx criticized in his famous letter to Bracke. Referring
 specially to the question of the state, Engels said:

"The free people's state has been transferred into the free
 state. Taken in its grammatical sense, a free state is one where
 the state is free in relation to its citizens, hence a state with
 a despotic government. The whole talk about the state should be
 dropped, especially since the Commune, which was no longer a
 state in the proper sense of the word. The 'people's state' has
 been thrown in our faces by the anarchists to the point of
 disgust, although already Marx's book against Proudhon and later
 the Communist
 Manifesto say plainly that with the introduction of the
 socialist order of society the state dissolves of itself [sich
 auflost] and disappears. As the state is only a transitional
 institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to
 hold down one's adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to
 talk of a 'free people's state'; so long as the proletariat still
 needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom
 but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it
 becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to
 exist. We would therefore propose replacing the state everywhere
 by Gemeinwesen , a good old German word which can very
 well take the place of the French word commune."

 ( pp.321-22
	of the German original .) [3]

It should be borne in mind that this letter refers to the party
 programme which Marx criticized in a letter dated only a few
 weeks later than the above (Marx's letter is dated May 5,
 1875 ), and that at the time Engels was living with Marx in
 London. Consequently, when he says “we” in the last sentence,
 Engels undoubtedly, in his own as well as in Marx's name,
 suggests to the leader of the German workers' party that the
 word “state” be struck out of the programme and replaced by the
 word “community”.

What a howl about “anarchism” would be raised by the leading
 lights of present-day “Marxism”, which has been falsified for
 the convenience of the opportunists, if such an amendment of the
 programme were suggested to them!

Let them howl. This will earn them the praises of the bourgeoisie.

And we shall go on with our work. In revising the programme of
 our Party, we must by all means take the advice of Engels and
 Marx into consideration in order to come nearer the truth, to
 restore Marxism by ridding it of distortions, to guide the
 struggle of the working class for its emancipation more
 correctly. Certainly no one opposed to the advice of Engels and
 Marx will be found among the Bolsheviks. The only difficulty
 that may perhaps arise will be in regard to the term. In German
 there are two words meaning “community”, of which Engels used
 the one which does not denote a single community, but their
 totality, a system of communities. In Russian there is no such
 word, and we may have to choose the French word “commune”,
 although this also has its drawbacks.

"The Commune was no longer a state in the proper sense of the
 word"--this is the most theoretically important statement
 Engels makes. After what has been said above, this statement is
 perfectly clear. The Commune was ceasing to be a state since it
 had to suppress, not the majority of the population, but a
 minority (the exploiters). It had smashed the bourgeois state
 machine. In place of a special coercive force the population
 itself came on the scene. All this was a departure from the
 state in the proper sense of the word. And had the Commune
 become firmly established, all traces of the state in it would
 have "withered away" of themselves; it would not have had to
 “abolish” the institutions of the state--they would have ceased
 to function as they ceased to have anything to do.

"The 'people's state' has been thrown in our faces by the
 anarchists". In saying this, Engels above all has in mind
 Bakunin and his attacks on the German Social-Democrats. Engels
 admits that these attacks were justified insofar as the
 "people's state" was as much an absurdity and as much a
 departure from socialism as the "free people's state". Engels
 tried to put the struggle of the German Social-Democrats against
 the anarchists on the right lines, to make this struggle correct
 in principle, to ride it of opportunist prejudices concerning
 the “state”. Unfortunately, Engels' letter was pigeon-holed for
 36 years. We shall see farther on that, even after this letter
 was published, Kautsky persisted in virtually the same mistakes
 against which Engels had warned.

Bebel replied to Engels in a letter dated September 21, 1875, in
 which he wrote, among other things, that he "fully agreed" with
 Engels' opinion of the draft programme, and that he had
 reproached Liebknecht with readiness to make concessions (p.334
 of the German edition of Bebel's memoirs, Vol.II). But if we
 take Bebel's pamphlet, Our Aims , we find there views on
 the state that are absolutely wrong.

"The state must... be transformed from one based on class rule
 into a people's state."

 ( Unsere Ziele , 1886, p.14)

This was printed in the ninth (ninth!) edition of Bebel's
 pamphlet! It is not surprising that opportunist views on the
 state, so persistently repeated, were absorbed by the German
 Social-Democrats, especially as Engels' revolutionary
 interpretations had been safely pigeon-holed, and all the
 conditions of life were such as to “wean” them from revolution
 for a long time.


2. Criticism of the Draft of the Erfurt Programme
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


In analyzing Marxist teachings on the state, the criticism of
 the draft of the Erfurt

 Programme, [4] sent by Engels to Kautsky on
 June 29, 1891, and published only 10 years later in Neue
 Zeit , cannot be ignored; for it is with the opportunist
 views of the Social-Democrats on questions of state organization
 that this criticism is mainly concerned.

We shall note in passing that Engels also makes an exceedingly
 valuable observation on economic questions, which shows how
 attentively and thoughtfully he watched the various changes
 occurring in modern capitalism, and how for this reason he was
 able to foresee to a certain extent the tasks of our present,
 the imperialist, epoch. Here is that observation: referring to
 the word “planlessness” (Planlosigkeit), used in the draft
 programme, as characteristic of capitalism, Engels wrote:

"When we pass from joint-stock companies to trusts which assume
 control over, and monopolize, whole industries, it is not only
 private production that ceases, but also planlessness."

 ( Neue Zeit , Vol. XX, 1,
 1901-02, p.8)

Here was have what is most essential in the theoretical
 appraisal of the latest phase of capitalism, i.e., imperialism,
 namely, that capitalism becomes monopoly capitalism. The latter
 must be emphasized because the erroneous bourgeois reformist
 assertion that monopoly capitalism or state-monopoly capitalism
 is no longer capitalism, but can now be called "state socialism"
 and so on, is very common. The trusts, of course, never
 provided, do not now provide, and cannot provide complete
 planning. But however much they do plan, however much the
 capitalist magnates calculate in advance the volume of
 production on a national and even on an international scale, and
 however much they systematically regulate it, we still remain
 under capitalism--at its new stage, it is true, but still
 capitalism, without a doubt. The “proximity” of such capitalism
 to socialism should serve genuine representatives of the
 proletariat as an argument proving the proximity, facility,
 feasibility, and urgency of the socialist revolution, and not at
 all as an argument for tolerating the repudiation of such a
 revolution and the efforts to make capitalism look more
 attractive, something which all reformists are trying to do.

But to return to the question of the state. In his letter
 Engels makes three particularly valuable suggestions: first, in
 regard to the republic; second, in regard to the connection
 between the national question and state organization; and,
 third, in regard to local self-government.

In regard to the republic, Engels made this the focal point of
 this criticism of the draft of the Erfurt Programme. And when
 we recall the importance which the Erfurt Programme acquired for
 all the Social- Democrats of the world, and that it became the
 model for the whole Second International, we may say without
 exaggeration that Engels thereby criticizes the opportunism of
 the whole Second International.

"The political demands of the draft," engels wrote, "have one great
 fault. It lacks [Engels' italics] precisely what should have
 been said."

And, later on, he makes it clear that the German Constitution
 is, strictly speaking, a copy of the extremely reactionary
 Constitution of 1850, that the Reichstag is only, as Wilhelm
 Liebknecht put it, "the fig leaf of absolutism" and that to wish
 "to transform all the instruments of labor into common property"
 on the basis of a constitution which legalizes the existence of
 petty states and the federation of petty German states is an
 "obvious absurdity".

"To touch on that is dangerous, however," Engels added, knowing
 only too well that it was impossible legally to include in the
 programme the demand for a republic in Germany. But he refused
 to merely accept this obvious consideration which satisfied
 “everybody”. He continued: "Nevertheless, somehow or other, the
 thing has to be attacked. How necessary this is is shown
 precisely at the present time by opportunism, which is gaining
 ground [einreissende] in a large section of the Social-Democrat
 press. Fearing a renewal of the Anti-Socialist

 Law, [5] or
 recalling all manner of overhasty pronouncements made during the
 reign of that law, they now want the Party to find the present
 legal order in Germany adequate for putting through all Party
 demands by peaceful means...."

Engels particularly stressed the fundamental fact that the
 German Social-Democrats were prompted by fear of a renewal of
 the Anti- Socialist Law, and explicitly described it as
 opportunism; he declared that precisely because there was no
 republic and no freedom in Germany, the dreams of a “peaceful”
 path were perfectly absurd. Engels was careful not to tie his
 hands. He admitted that in republican or very free countries
 "one can conceive" (only “conceive”!) of a peaceful development
 towards socialism, but in Germany, he repeated,

"... in Germany, where the government is almost omnipotent and
 the Reichstag and all other representative bodies have no real
 power, to advocate such a thing in Germany, where, moreover,
 there is no need to do so, means removing the fig leaf from
 absolutism and becoming oneself a screen for its nakedness."

The great majority of the official leaders of the German Social-
 Democratic Party, which pigeon-holed this advice, have really proved to
 be a screen for absolutism.

"... In the long run such a policy can only lead one's own party
 astray. They push general, abstract political questions into
 the foreground, thereby concealing the immediate concrete
 questions, which at the moment of the first great events, the
 first political crisis, automatically pose themselves. What can
 result from this except that at the decisive moment the party
 suddenly proves helpless and that uncertainty and discord on the
 most decisive issues reign in it because these issues have never
 been discussed? ...

"This forgetting of the great, the principal considerations for
 the momentary interests of the day, this struggling and striving
 for the success of the moment regardless of later consequences,
 this sacrifice of the future of the movement for its present may
 be 'honestly' meant, but it is and remains opportunism, and
 'honest' opportunism is perhaps the most dangerous of all....

"If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working
 class can only come to power in the form of the democratic
 republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship
 of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already
 shown...."

Engels realized here in a particularly striking form the
 fundamental idea which runs through all of Marx's works, namely,
 that the democratic republic is the nearest approach to the
 dictatorship of the proletariat. For such a republic, without
 in the least abolishing the rule of capital, and, therefore, the
 oppression of the masses and the class struggle, inevitably leads
 to such an extension, development, unfolding, and
 intensification of this struggle that, as soon as it becomes
 possible to meet the fundamental interests of the oppressed
 masses, this possibility is realized inevitably and solely
 through the dictatorship of the proletariat, through the
 leadership of those masses by the proletariat. These, too, are
 "forgotten words" of marxism for the whole of the Second
 International, and the fact that they have been forgotten was
 demonstrated with particular vividness by the history of the
 Menshevik Party during the first six months of the Russian
 revolution of 1917.

On the subject of a federal republic, in connection with the national
 composition of the population, Engels wrote:

"What should take the place of the present-day Germany [with its
 reactionary monarchical Constitution and its equally reactionary
 division into petty states, a division which perpetuates all the
 specific features of “Prussianism” instead of dissolving them in
 Germany as a whole]? In my view, the proletariat can only use
 the form of the one and indivisible republic. In the gigantic
 territory of the United States, a federal republic is still, on
 the whole, a necessity, although in the Eastern states it is
 already becoming a hindrance. It would be a step forward in
 Britain where the two islands are peopled by four nations and in
 spite of a single Parliament three different systems of
 legislation already exist side by side. In little Switzerland,
 it has long been a hindrance, tolerable only because Switzerland
 is content to be a purely passive member of the European state
 system. For Germany, federalization on the Swiss model would be
 an enormous step backward. Two points distinguish a union state
 from a completely unified state: first, that each member state,
 each canton, has its own civil and criminal legislative and
 judicial system, and, second, that alongside a popular chamber
 there is also a federal chamber in which each canton, whether
 large or small, votes as such." In Germany, the union state is
 the transition to the completely unified state, and the
 "revolution from above" of 1866 and 1870 must not be reversed
 but supplemented by a "movement from below".

Far from being indifferent to the forms of state, Engels, on the
 contrary, tried to analyze the transitional forms with the
 utmost thoroughness in order to establish, in accordance with
 the concrete historical peculiarities of each particular case,
 from what and to what the given transitional form is passing.

Approaching the matter from the standpoint of the proletariat
 and the proletarian revolution, Engels, like Marx, upheld
 democratic centralism, the republic--one and indivisible. He
 regarded the federal republic either as an exception and a
 hindrance to development, or as a transition from a monarchy to
 a centralized republic, as a "step forward" under certain
 special conditions. And among these special conditions, he puts
 the national question to the fore.

Although mercilessly criticizing the reactionary nature of small
 states, and the screening of this by the national question in
 certain concrete cases, Engels, like Marx, never betrayed the
 slightest desire to brush aside the national question--a desire
 of which the Dutch and Polish Marxists, who proceed from their
 perfectly justified opposition to the narrow philistine
 nationalism of “their” little states, are often guilty.

Even in regard to britain, where geographical conditions, a
 common language and the history of many centuries would seem to
 have "put an end" to the national question in the various small
 divisions of the country--even in regard to to that country,
 Engels reckoned with the plain fact that the national question
 was not yet a thing of the past, and recognized in consequence
 that the establishment of a federal republic would be a "step
 forward". Of course, there is not the slightest hint here of
 Engels abandoning the criticism of the shortcomings of a federal
 republic or renouncing the most determined advocacy of, and
 struggle for, a unified and centralized democratic republic.

But Engels did not at all men democratic centralism in the
 bureaucratic sense in which the term is used by bourgeois and
 petty-bourgeois ideologists, the anarchists among the latter.
 His idea of centralism did not in the least preclude such broad
 local self-government as would combine the voluntary defence of
 the unity of the state by the “communes” and districts, and the
 complete elimination of all bureaucratic practices and all
 “ordering” from above. Carrying forward the programme views of
 Marxism on the state, Engels wrote:

"So, then, a unified republic--but not in the sense of the
 present French Republic, which is nothing but the Empire
 established in 1798 without the Emperor. From 1792 to 1798 each
 French department, each commune [Gemeinde], enjoyed complete
 self-government on the American model, and this is what we too
 must have. How self-government is to be organized and how we
 can manage, without a bureaucracy has been shown to us by
 America and the first French Republic, and is being shown even
 today by Australia, Canada and the other English colonies. And
 a provincial [regional] and communal self-government of this
 type is far freer than, for instance, Swiss federalism, under
 which, it is true, the canton is very independent in relation to
 the Bund [i.e., the federated state as a whole], but is also
 independent in relation to the district [Bezirk] and the
 commune. The cantonal governments appoint the district
 governors [Bezirksstatthalter] and prefects--which is unknown
 in English-speaking countries and which we want to abolish here
 as resolutely in the future as the Prussian Landrate and
 Regierungsrate" (commissioners, district police chiefs,
 governors, and in general all officials appointed from above).
 Accordingly, Engels proposes the following words for the
 self-government clause in the programme: "Complete
 self-government for the provinces [gubernias or regions],
 districts and communes through officials elected by universal
 suffrage. The abolition of all local and provincial authorities
 appointed by the state."

I have already had occassion to point out--in Pravda (No.68, May 28, 1917), which was suppressed by the government of
 Kerensky and other “socialist” Ministers--how on this point (of
 course, not on this point alone by any mens) our
 pseudo-socialist representatives of pseudo- revolutionary
 pseudo-democracy have made glaring departures from democracy.
 Naturally, people who have bound themselves by a “coalition” to
 the imperialist bourgeoisie have remained deaf to this
 criticism.

It is extremely important to note that Engels, armed with facts,
 disproved by a most precise example the prejudice which is very
 widespread, particularly among petty-bourgeois democrats, that a
 federal republic necessarily means a greater amount of freedom
 than a centralized republic. This is wrong. It is disproved by
 the facts cited by Engels regarding the centralized French
 Republic of 792-98 and the federal Swiss Republic. The really
 democratic centralized republic gave more freedom that the
 federal republic. In other words, the greatest amount of local,
 regional, and other freedom known in history was accorded by a
 centralized and not a federal republic.

Insufficient attention has been and is being paid in our Party
 propaganda and agitation to this fact, as, indeed, to the whole
 question of the federal and the centralized republic and local
 self-government.


The 1891 Preface to Marx's "The Civil War in France"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


In his preface to the third edition of The
 Civil War in France (this preface is dated March 18, 1891,
 and was originally published in Neue Zeit ), Engels, in
 addition to some interesting incidental remarks on questions
 concerning the attitude towards the state, gave a remarkably
 vivid summary of the lessons of the

 Commune. [6] This summary, made
 more profound by the entire experience of the 20 years that
 separated the author from the Commune, and directed expressly
 against the "superstitious belief in the state" so widespread in
 Germany, may justly be called the last word of Marxism on the
 question under consideration.

In France, Engels observed, the workers emerged with arms from
 every revolution: "therefore the disarming of the workers was
 the first commandment for the bourgeois, who were at the helm of
 the state. Hence, after every revolution won by the workers, a
 new struggle, ending with the defeat of the workers."

This summary of the experience of bourgeois revolutions is as
 concise as it is expressive. The essence of the matter--among
 other things, on the question of the state (has the oppressed
 class arms?)--is here remarkably well-grasped. It is precisely
 this essence that is most often evaded by both professors
 influenced by bourgeois ideology, and by petty-bourgeois
 democrats. In the Russian revolution of 1917, the honor
 (Cavaignac honor) of blabbing this secret of bourgeois
 revolutions fell to the Menshevik, would-be Marxist, Tsereteli.
 In his “historic” speech of June 11, Tsereteli blurted out that
 the bourgeoisie were determined to disarm the Petrograd workers--presenting, of course, this decision as his own, and as a
 necessity for the “state” in general!

Tsereteli's historical speech of June 11 will, of course, serve
 every historian of the revolution of 1917 as a graphic
 illustration of how the Social-Revolutionary and Menshevik bloc,
 led by Mr. Tsereteli, deserted to the bourgeoisie against the
 revolutionary proletariat.

Another incidental remark of Engels', also connected with the
 question of the state, deals with religion. It is well-known
 that the German Social-Democrats, as they degenerated and became
 increasingly opportunist, slipped more and more frequently into
 the philistine misinterpretation of the celebrated formula:
 "Religion is to be declared a private matter." That is, the
 formula was twisted to mean that religion was a private matter
 even for the party of the revolutionary proletariat!! It was
 against this complete betrayal of the revolutionary programme of
 the proletariat that Engels vigorously protested. In 1891 he
 saw only the very feeble beginnings of opportunism in his party,
 and, therefore, he expressed himself with extreme caution:

"As almost only workers, or recognized representatives of the  workers, sat in the Commune, its decisions bore a decidedly  proletarian character. Either they decreed reforms which the  republican bourgeoisie had failed to pass solely out of  cowardice, but which provided a necessary basis for the free  activity of the working class--such as the realization of the  principle that in relation to the state religion is a  purely private matter--or the Commune promulgated decrees which  were in the direct interest of the working class and in part cut  deeply into the old order of society."

Engels deliberately emphasized the words "in relation to the  state" as a straight thrust at at German opportunism, which had  declared religion to be a private matter in relation to the  party, thus degrading the party of the revolutionary proletariat  to the level of the most vulgar "free- thinking" philistinism,  which is prepared to allow a non-denominational status, but  which renounces the party struggle against the opium of religion  which stupifies the people.

The future historian of the German Social-Democrats, in tracing
 the roots of their shameful bankruptcy in 1914, will find a fair
 amount of interesting material on this question, beginning with
 the evasive declarations in the articles of the party's
 ideological leader, Kautsky, which throw the door wide open to
 opportunism, and ending with the attitude of the party towards
 the

 "Los-von-Kirche-Bewegung" [7] (the "Leave-the-Church" movement) in 1913.

But let us see how, 20 years after the Commune, Engels summed up its
 lessons for the fighting proletariat.

Here are the lessons to which Engels attached prime importance:

"... It was precisely the oppressing power of the former
 centralized government, army, political parties, bureaucracy,
 which Napoleon had created in 1798 and which every new
 government had since then taken over as a welcome instrument and
 used against its opponents--it was this power which was to fall
 everywhere, just as it had fallen in Paris.

"From the very outset the Commune had to recognize that the
 working class, once in power, could not go on managing with the
 old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only
 just-gained supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand,
 do away with all the old machinery of oppression previously used
 against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against
 its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without
 exception, subject to recall at any time...."

Engels emphasized once again that not only under a monarchy, but
 also under a democratic republic the state remains a state,
 i.e., it retains its fundamental distinguishing feature of
 transforming the officials, the 'servants of society", its
 organs, into the masters of society.

"Against this transformation of the state and the organs of the
 state from servants of society into masters of society--an
 inevitable transformation in all previous states--the Commune
 used two infallible means. In the first place, it filled all
 posts--administrative, judicial, and educational--by election
 on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to
 recall at any time by the electors. And, in the second place,
 it paid all officials, high or low, only the wages received by
 other workers. The highest salary paid by the Commune to anyone
 was 6,000 francs. In this way a dependable barrier to
 place-hunting and careerism was set up, even apart from the
 binding mandates to delegates to representative bodies, which
 were added besides...."

Engels here approached the interesting boundary line at which
 consistent democracy, on the one hand, is transformed into
 socialism and, on the other, demands socialism. For, in order
 to abolish the state, it is necessary to convert the functions
 of the civil service into the simple operations of control and
 accounting that are within the scope and ability of the vast
 majority of the population, and, subsequently, of every single
 individual. And if careerism is to be abolished completely, it
 must be made impossible for “honorable” though profitless posts
 in the Civil Service to be used as a springboard to highly
 lucrative posts in banks or joint-stock companies, as constantly
 happens in all the freest capitalist countries.

Engels, however, did not make the mistake some Marxists make in
 dealing, for example, with the question of the right of nations
 to self- determination, when they argue that is is impossible
 under capitalism and will be superfluous under socialism. This
 seemingly clever but actually incorrect statement might be made
 in regard to any democratic institution, including moderate
 salaries for officials, because fully consistent democracy is
 impossible under capitalism, and under socialism all democracy
 will wither away.

This is a sophism like the old joke about a man becoming bald by losing
 one more hair.

To develop democracy to the utmost, to find the forms for this
 development, to test them by practice, and so forth--all this is
 one of the component tasks of the struggle for the social
 revolution. Taken separately, no kind of democracy will bring
 socialism. But in actual life democracy will never be "taken
 separately"; it will be "taken together" with other things, it
 will exert its influence on economic life as well, will
 stimulate its transformation; and in its turn it will be
 influenced by economic development, and so on. This is the
 dialectics of living history.

Engels continued:

"... This shattering [Sprengung] of the former state power and
 its replacement by a new and truly democratic one is described
 in detail in the third section of The Civil War . But
 it was necessary to touch briefly here once more on some of its
 features, because in Germany particularly the superstitious
 belief in the state has passed from philosophy into the general
 consciousness of the bourgeoisie and even of many workers.
 According to the philosophical conception, the state is the
 'realization of the idea', or the Kingdom of God on earth,
 translated into philosophical terms, the sphere in which eternal
 truth and justice are, or should be, realized. And from this
 follows a superstitious reverence for the state and everything
 connected with it, which takes root the more readily since
 people are accustomed from childhood to imagine that the affairs
 and interests common to the whole of society could not be looked
 after other than as they have been looked after in the past,
 that is, through the state and its lucratively positioned
 officials. And people think they have taken quite an
 extraordinary bold step forward when they have rid themselves of
 belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic
 republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a
 machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed
 in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy. And at
 best it is an evil inherited by the proletariat after its
 victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the
 victorious proletariat will have to lop off as speedily as
 possible, just as the Commune had to, until a generation reared
 in new, free social conditions is able to discard the entire
 lumber of the state."

Engels warned the Germans not to forget the principles of
 socialism with regard to the state in general in connection with
 the substitution of a republic for the monarchy. His warnings
 now read like a veritable lesson to the Tseretelis and Chernovs,
 who in their “coalition” practice have revealed a superstitious
 belief in, and a superstitious reverence for, the state!

Two more remarks.

 1. Engels' statement that in a democratic republic, "no less"
 than in a monarchy, the state remains a "machine for the
 oppression of one class by another" by no means signifies
 that the form of oppression makes no difference to the
 proletariat, as some anarchists “teach”. A wider, freer
 and more open form of the class struggle and of class
 oppression vastly assists the proletariat in its struggle
 for the abolition of classes in general.

2. Why will only a new generation be able to discard the entire lumber
 of the state? This question is bound up with that of overcoming
 democracy, with which we shall deal now.


Engels on the Overcoming of Democracy
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Engels came to express his views on this subject when establishing that
 the term "Social-Democrat" was scientifically wrong.

In a preface to an edition of his articles of the seventies on
 various subjects, mostly on “international” questions
 ( Internationales aus dem Volkstaat ), dated January 3,
 1894, i.e., written a year and a half before his death, Engels
 wrote that in all his articles he used the word “Communist”, and
 not "Social-Democrat", because at that time the Proudhonists in
 France and the

 Lassalleans [8] in Germany called themselves Social-Democrats.

"... For Marx and myself," continued Engels, "it was therefore
 absolutely impossible to use such a loose term to characterize
 our special point of view. Today things are different, and the
 word ["Social-Democrat"] may perhaps pass muster [mag
 passieren], inexact [unpassend, unsuitable] though it still is
 for a party whose economic programme is not merely socialist in
 general, but downright communist, and whose ultimate political
 aim is to overcome the whole state and, consequently, democracy
 as well. The names of real political parties, however,
 are never wholly appropriate; the party develops while the name

 stays." [9]

The dialectician Engels remained true to dialectics to the end
 of his days. Marx and I, he said, had a splendid,
 scientifically exact name for the party, but there was no real
 party, i.e., no mass proletarian party. Now (at the end of the
 19th century) there was a real party, but its name was
 scientifically wrong. Never mind, it would "pass muster", so
 long as the party developed, so long as the scientific in
 accuracy of the name was not hidden from it and did not hinder
 its development on the right direction!

Perhaps some wit would console us Bolsheviks in the manner of
 Engels: we have a real party, it is developing splendidly; even
 such a meaningless and ugly term as “Bolshevik” will "pass
 muster", although it expresses nothing whatever but the purely
 accidental fact that at the Brussels-London Congress of 1903 we
 were in the majority. Perhaps now that the persecution of our
 Party by republicans and “revolutionary” petty-bourgeois
 democrats in July and August has earned the name “Bolshevik”
 such universal respect, now that, in addition, this persecution
 marks the tremendous historical progress our Party has made in
 its real development--perhaps now even I might hesitate to
 insist on the suggestion I made in April to change the name of
 our Party. Perhaps I would propose a “compromise” to my
 comrades, namely, to call ourselves the Communist Party, but to
 retain the word “Bolshevik” in brackets.

But the question of the name of the Party is incomparably less
 important than the question of the attitude of the revolutionary
 proletariat to the state.

In the usual argument about the state, the mistake is constantly
 made against which Engels warned and which we have in passing
 indicated above, namely, it is constantly forgotten that the
 abolition of the state means also the abolition of democracy;
 that the withering away of the state means the withering away of
 democracy.

At first sight this assertion seems exceedingly strange and
 incomprehensible; indeed, someone may even suspect us of
 expecting the advent of a system of society in which the
 principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will
 not be observed--for democracy means the recognition of this
 very principle.

No, democracy is not identical with the subordination of the
 minority to the majority. Democracy is a state which recognizes
 the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e., an
 organization for the systematic use of force by one class
 against another, by one section of the population against
 another.

We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e.,
 all organized and systematic violence, all use of violence
 against people in general. We do not expect the advent of a
 system of society in which the principle of subordination of the
 minority to the majority will not be observed. In striving for
 socialism, however, we are convinced that it will develop into
 communism and, therefore, that the need for violence against
 people in general, for the subordination of one man to another,
 and of one section of the population to another, will vanish
 altogether since people will become accustomed to observing the
 elementary conditions of social life without violence and
 without subordination.

In order to emphasize this element of habit, Engels speaks of a
 new generation, "reared in new, free social conditions", which
 will "be able to discard the entire lumber of the state"--of
 any state, including the democratic-republican state.

In order to explain this, it is necessary to analyze he economic basis
 of the withering away of the state.


------------------------------------------------------------
Endnotes
------------------------------------------------------------


[1] See Frederick Engels, The Housing Question (Karl Marx and
 Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 2, Moscow, 1973, pp. 317-18).

Further below, on pp. 439-40 of this volume, Lenin is quoting from the same
 work by Engels (op. cit., pp. 370, 355).

[2] Lenin is referring to the articles "L'indifferenza in materia politica"
 by Karl Marx and "Dell' Autorita" by Frederick Engels (Almanacco Republicano
 per l'anno 1874). Further below, on pp. 440-41, 442, 442-43 of this volume,
 Lenin is quoting from the same articles.

[3] See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow,
 1965, pp. 293-94.

[4] Erfurt Programme--the programme adopted by the German Social-Democratic
 Party at its Erfurt Congress in October 1891. A step forward compared with
 the Gotha Programme (1875), it was based on Marx's doctrine of the
 inevitable downfall of the capitalist mode of production and its replacement
 by the socialist mode. It stressed the necessity for the working class to
 wage a political struggle, pointed out the party's role as the leader of
 that struggle, and so on. But it also made serious concessions to
 opportunism. Engels criticised the original draft of the pro- gramme in
 detail in his work A Critique of the Draft Social- Democratic Programme of
 1891 It was virtually a critique of the opportunism of the Second
 International as a whole. But the German Social-Democratic leaders concealed
 Engels's critique from the rank and file, and disregarded his highly
 important comments in drawing up the final text of the programme. Lenin
 considered the fact that the Erfurt Programme said nothing about the
 dictatorship of the proletariat to be its chief defect and a cowardly
 concession to opportunism.

[5] The Anti-Socialist Law (Exceptional Law Against the Socialists) was
 enacted in Germany by the Bismarck government in 1878 to combat the
 working-class and socialist movement. Under this law, all Social-Democratic
 Party organisations, all mass organisa- tions of the workers, and the
 working-class press were banned, socialist literature was confiscated and
 the Social-Democrats were persecuted, to the point of banishment. These
 repressive measures did not, however, break the Social-Democratic Party,
 which readjusted itself to illegal conditions. Der Sozial-Demokrat, the
 party's Central Organ, was published abroad and party congresses were held
 at regular intervals (1880, 1883 and 1887). In Germany herself, the
 Social-Democratic organisations and groups were coming back to life
 underground, an illegal Central Committee leading their activities. Besides,
 the Party widely used legal opportunities to establish closer links with the
 working people, and its influence was growing steadily. At the Reichstag
 elections in 1890, it polled three times as many votes as in 1878. Marx and
 Engels did much to help the Social-Democrats. In 1890 popular pressure and
 the growing working-class movement led to the annulment of the
 Anti-Socialist Law.

[6] See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 2, Moscow,
 1973, pp. 178-89.

Further below, on pp. 454, 455, 456-58 of this volume, Lenin is quoting from
 the same work (op. cit., pp. 179-80, 184, 187-89).

[7] The Los-von-Kirche-Bewegung (the "Leave-the-Church" movement), or
 Kirchenaustrittsbewegung (Movement to Secede from the Church) assumed a vast
 scale in Germany before the First World War. In January 1914 Neue Zeit
 began, with the revisionist Paul Gdhre's article "Kirchenaustrittsbewegung
 und Sozialdemokratie" ("The Movement to Secede from the Church and
 Social-Democracy"), to discuss the attitude of the German Social-Democratic
 Party to the movement. During that discussion prominent German
 Social-Democratic leaders failed to rebuff Göhre, who affirmed that the
 party should remain neutral towards the Movement to Secede from the Church
 and forbid its members to engage in propaganda against religion and the
 Church on behalf of the party.

Lenin took notice of the discussion while working on material for
 Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (see present edition, Vol. 39,
 p. 591).

[8] Lassalleans--supporters of the German petty-bourgeois socialist
 Ferdinand Lassalle, members of the General Association of German Workers
 founded at the Congress of Workers' Organisations, held in Leipzig in 1863,
 to counterbalance the bourgeois progressists who were trying to gain
 influence over the working class. The first President of the Association was
 Lassalle, who formulated its programme and the fundamentals of its tactics.
 The Association's political programme was declared to be the struggle for
 universal suffrage, and its economic programme, the struggle for workers'
 production associations, to be subsidised by the state. In their practical
 activities, Lassalle and his followers adapted themselves to the hegemony of
 Prussia and supported the Great Power policy of Bismarck. "Objectively,"
 wrote Engels to Marx on January 27, 1865, "this was a base action and a
 betrayal of the whole working-class movement to the Prussians." Marx and
 Engels frequently and sharply criticised the theory, tactics, and
 organisational principles of the Lassalleans as an opportunist trend in the
 German working-class movement.

[9] See Frederick Engels, "Vorwort zur Broschüre Internationales aus dem
 'Volksstaat' (1871-1875)", Marx-Engels, Werke, Bd. 22, Berlin, 1963, S.
 417-18.

Next: Economic Basis of the Withering Away of
 the State


Presentation of the Question by Marx The Transition from Captialism to Communism The First Phase of Communist Society The Higher Phase of Communist Society

Marx explains this question most thoroughly in his Critique 	of the Gotha Programme (letter to Bracke, May 5, 1875, 	which was not published until 1891 when it was printed in Neue Zeit , vol. IX, 1, and which has appeared in 	Russian in a special edition).  The polemical part of this 	remarkable work, which contains a criticism of Lassalleanism, 	has, so to speak, overshadowed its positive part, namely, the 	analysis of the connection between the development of 	communism and the withering away of the state.


1. Presentation of the Question by Marx
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


From a superficial comparison of Marx’s letter to Bracke of May 5, 1875, with Engels’ letter to Bebel of March 28, 1875, which we examined above, it might appear that Marx was much more of a “champion of the state” than Engels, and that the difference of opinion between the two writers on the question of the state was very considerable.

Engels suggested to Bebel that all chatter about the state be dropped altogether, that the word “state” be eliminated from the programme altogether and the word “community” substituted for it.  Engels even declared that the Commune was long a state in the proper sense of the word.  Yet Marx even spoke of the “future state in communist society", i.e., he would seem to recognize the need for the state even under communism.

But such a view would be fundamentally wrong.  A closer examination shows that Marx’s and Engels’ views on the state and its withering away were completely identical, and that Marx’s expression quoted above refers to the state in the process of withering away.

Clearly, there can be no question of specifying the moment of the future “withering away", the more so since it will obviously be a lengthy process.  The apparent difference between Marx and Engels is due to the fact that they dealt with different subjects and pursued different aims.  Engels set out to show Bebel graphically, sharply, and in broad outline the utter absurdity of the current prejudices concerning the state (shared to no small degree by Lassalle).  Marx only touched upon this question in passing, being interested in another subject, namely, the development of communist society.

The whole theory of Marx is the application of the theory of development–in its most consistent, complete, considered and pithy form–to modern capitalism.  Naturally, Marx was faced with the problem of applying this theory both to the forthcoming collapse of capitalism and to the future development of future communism.

On the basis of what facts, then, can the question of the future development of future communism be dealt with?

On the basis of the fact that it has its origin in capitalism, that it develops historically from capitalism, that it is the result of the action of a social force to which capitalism gave birth.  There is no trace of an attempt on Marx’s part to make up a utopia, to indulge in idle guess-work about what cannot be known.  Marx treated the question of communism in the same way as a naturalist would treat the question of the development of, say, a new biological variety, once he knew that it had originated in such and such a way and was changing in such and such a definite direction.

To begin with, Marx brushed aside the confusion the Gotha Programme brought into the question of the relationship between state and society.  He wrote:

‘Present-day society’ is capitalist society, which exists in all civilized countries, being more or less free from medieval admixture, more or less modified by the particular historical development of each country, more or less developed.  On the other hand, the ‘present-day state’ changes with a country’s frontier.  It is different in the Prusso-German Empire from what it is in Switzerland, and different in England from what it is in the United States.  ‘The present-day state’ is, therefore, a fiction.

“Nevertheless, the different states of the different civilized countries, in spite of their motley diversity of form, all have this in common, that they are based on modern bourgeois society, only one more or less capitalistically developed.  The have, therefore, also certain essential characteristics in common.  In this sense it is possible to speak of the ‘present-day state’, in contrast with the future, in which its present root, bourgeois society, will have died off.

“The question then arises: what transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousandfold combination of the word people with the word   state." [1]

After thus ridiculing all talk about a “people’s state", Marx formulated the question and gave warning, as it were, that those seeking a scientific answer to it should use only firmly-established scientific data.

The first fact that has been established most accurately by the whole theory of development, by science as a whole–a fact that was ignored by the utopians, and is ignored by the present-day opportunists, who are afraid of the socialist revolution–is that, historically, there must undoubtedly be a special stage, or a special phase, of transition from capitalism to communism.


2. The Transition from Capitalism to Communism
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Marx continued:

“Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."

Marx bases this conclusion on an analysis of the role played by the proletariat in modern capitalist society, on the data concerning the development of this society, and on the irreconcilability of the antagonistic interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

Previously the question was put as follows: to achieve its emancipation, the proletariat must overthrow the bourgeoisie, win political power and establish its revolutionary dictatorship.

Now the question is put somewhat differently: the transition from capitalist society–which is developing towards communism–to communist society is impossible without a “political transition period", and the state in this period can only be the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

What, then, is the relation of this dictatorship to democracy?

We have seen that the Communist Manifesto simply places side by side the two concepts: “to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class” and “to win the battle of democracy".  On the basis of all that has been said above, it is possible to determine more precisely how democracy changes in the transition from capitalism to communism.

In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favourable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic.  But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners.  Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that “they cannot be bothered with democracy", “cannot be bothered with politics"; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life.

The correctness of this statement is perhaps most clearly confirmed by Germany, because constitutional legality steadily endured there for a remarkably long time–nearly half a century (1871-1914)–and during this period the Social-Democrats were able to achieve far more than in other countries in the way of “utilizing legality", and organized a larger proportion of the workers into a political party than anywhere else in the world.

What is this largest proportion of politically conscious and active wage slaves that has so far been recorded in capitalist society? One million members of the Social-Democratic Party - out of 15,000,000 wage-workers! Three million organized in trade unions–out of 15,000,000!

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich–that is the democracy of capitalist society.  If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the “petty”–supposedly petty–details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for “paupers”!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc.,–we see restriction after restriction upon democracy.  These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been inclose contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.

Marx grasped this essence of capitalist democracy splendidly when, in analyzing the experience of the Commune, he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!

But from this capitalist democracy–that is inevitably narrow and stealthily pushes aside the poor, and is therefore hypocritical and false through and through–forward development does not proceed simply, directly and smoothly, towards “greater and greater democracy", as the liberal professors and petty-bourgeois opportunists would have us believe.  No, forward development, i.e., development towards communism, proceeds through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and cannot do otherwise, for the resistance of the capitalist exploiters cannot be broken by anyone else or in any other way.

And the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy.  Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists.  We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force; it is clear that there is no freedom and no democracy where there is suppression and where there is violence.

Engels expressed this splendidly in his letter to Bebel when he said, as the reader will remember, that “the proletariat needs the state, not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist".

Democracy for the vast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people–this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to communism.

Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no distinction between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then “the state...  ceases to exist", and “it becomes possible to speak of freedom".  Only then will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized, a democracy without any exceptions whatever.  And only then will democracy begin to wither away, owing to the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims. They will become accustomed to observing them without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state.

The expression “the state withers away” is very well-chosen, for it indicates both the gradual and the spontaneous nature of the process.  Only habit can, and undoubtedly will, have such an effect; for we see around us on millions of occassions how readily people become accustomed to observing the necessary rules of social intercourse when there is no exploitation, when there is nothing that arouses indignation, evokes protest and revolt, and creates the need for suppression.

And so in capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority.  The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority. Communism alone is capable of providing really complete democracy, and the more complete it is, the sooner it will become unnecessary and wither away of its own accord.

In other words, under capitalism we have the state in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression of one class by another, and, what is more, of the majority by the minority.  Naturally, to be successful, such an undertaking as the systematic suppression of the exploited majority by the exploiting minority calls for the utmost ferocity and savagery in the matter of suppressing, it calls for seas of blood, through which mankind is actually wading its way in slavery, serfdom and wage labor.

Furthermore, during the transition from capitalism to communism suppression is still necessary, but it is now the suppression of the exploiting minority by the exploited majority.  A special apparatus, a special machine for suppression, the “state”, is still necessary, but this is now a transitional state.  It is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word; for the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday is comparatively so easy, simple and natural a task that it will entail far less bloodshed than the suppression of the risings of slaves, serfs or wage-laborers, and it will cost mankind far less.  And it is compatible with the extension of democracy to such an overwhelming majority of the population that the need for a special machine of suppression will begin to disappear.  Naturally, the exploiters are unable to suppress the people without a highly complex machine for performing this task, but the people can suppress the exploiters even with a very simple “machine”, almost without a “machine”, without a special apparatus, by the simple organization of the armed people (such as the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, we would remark, running ahead).

Lastly, only communism makes the state absolutely unnecessary, for there is nobody to be suppressed–“nobody” in the sense of a class, of a systematic struggle against a definite section of the population.  We are not utopians, and do not in the least deny the possibility and inevitability of excesses on the part of individual persons , or the need to stop such excesses.  In the first place, however, no special machine, no special apparatus of suppression, is needed for this: this will be done by the armed people themselves, as simply and as readily as any crowd of civilized people, even in modern society, interferes to put a stop to a scuffle or to prevent a woman from being assaulted.  And, secondly, we know that the fundamental social cause of excesses, which consist in the violation of the rules of social intercourse, is the exploitation of the people, their want and their poverty.  With the removal of this chief cause, excesses will inevitably begin to “wither away".  We do not know how quickly and in what succession, but we do know they will wither away.  With their withering away the state will also wither away.

Without building utopias, Marx defined more fully what can be defined now regarding this future, namely, the differences between the lower and higher phases (levels, stages) of communist society.


3. The First Phase of Communist Society
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


In the Critique of the Gotha Programme , Marx goes into detail to disprove Lassalle’s idea that under socialism the worker will receive the “undiminished” or “full product of his labor".  Marx shows that from the whole of the social labor of society there must be deducted a reserve fund, a fund for the expansion of production, a fund for the replacement of the “wear and tear” of machinery, and so on.  Then, from the means of consumption must be deducted a fund for administrative expenses, for schools, hospitals, old people’s homes, and so on.

Instead of Lassalle’s hazy, obscure, general phrase ("the full product of his labor to the worker"), Marx makes a sober estimate of exactly how socialist society will have to manage its affairs.  Marx proceeds to make a concrete analysis of the conditions of life of a society in which there will be no capitalism, and says:

“What we have to deal with here [in analyzing the programme of the workers’ party] is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it comes."

It is this communist society, which has just emerged into the light of day out of the womb of capitalism and which is in every respect stamped with the birthmarks of the old society, that Marx terms the “first”, or lower, phase of communist society.

The means of production are no longer the private property of individuals.  The means of production belong to the whole of society.  Every member of society, performing a certain part of the socially-necessary work, receives a certificate from society to the effect that he has done a certain amount of work.  And with this certificate he receives from the public store of consumer goods a corresponding quantity of products.  After a deduction is made of the amount of labor which goes to the public fund, every worker, therefore, receives from society as much as he has given to it.

“Equality” apparently reigns supreme.

But when Lassalle, having in view such a social order (usually called socialism, but termed by Marx the first phase of communism), says that this is “equitable distribution", that this is “the equal right of all to an equal product of labor", Lassalle is mistaken and Marx exposes the mistake.

"Hence, the equal right,” says Marx, in this case still certainly conforms to “bourgeois law", which,like all law, implies inequality.  All law is an application of an equal measure to different people who in fact are not alike, are not equal to one another.  That is why the “equal right” is violation of equality and an injustice.  In fact, everyone, having performed as much social labor as another, receives an equal share of the social product (after the above-mentioned deductions).

But people are not alike: one is strong, another is weak; one is married, another is not; one has more children, another has less, and so on.  And the conclusion Marx draws is:

“... With an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, the right instead of being equal would have to be unequal."

The first phase of communism, therefore, cannot yet provide justice and equality; differences, and unjust differences, in wealth will still persist, but the exploitation of man by man will have become impossible because it will be impossible to seize the means of production–the factories, machines, land, etc.–and make them private property.  In smashing Lassalle’s petty-bourgeois, vague phrases about “equality” and “justice” in general, Marx shows the course of development of communist society, which is compelled to abolish at first only the “injustice” of the means of production seized by individuals, and which is unable at once to eliminate the other injustice, which consists in the distribution of consumer goods “according to the amount of labor performed” (and not according to needs).

The vulgar economists, including the bourgeois professors and “our” Tugan, constantly reproach the socialists with forgetting the inequality of people and with “dreaming” of eliminating this inequality.  Such a reproach, as we see, only proves the extreme ignorance of the bourgeois ideologists.

Marx not only most scrupulously takes account of the inevitable inequality of men, but he also takes into account the fact that the mere conversion of the means of production into the common property of the whole society (commonly called “socialism”) does not remove the defects of distribution and the inequality of “bourgeois laws” which continues to prevail so long as products are divided “according to the amount of labor performed". Continuing, Marx says:

“But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged, after prolonged birth pangs, from capitalist society.  Law can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby."

And so, in the first phase of communist society (usually called socialism) “bourgeois law” is not abolished in its entirety, but only in part, only in proportion to the economic revolution so far attained, i.e., only in respect of the means of production. “Bourgeois law” recognizes them as the private property of individuals.  Socialism converts them into common property.  To that extent–and to that extent alone–"bourgeois law” disappears.

However, it persists as far as its other part is concerned; it persists in the capacity of regulator (determining factor) in the distribution of products and the allotment of labor among the members of society.  The socialist principle, “He who does not work shall not eat", is already realized; the other socialist principle, “An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labor", is also already realized.  But this is not yet communism, and it does not yet abolish “bourgeois law", which gives unequal individuals, in return for unequal (really unequal) amounts of labor, equal amounts of products.

This is a “defect”, says Marx, but it is unavoidable in the first phase of communism; for if we are not to indulge in utopianism, we must not think that having overthrown capitalism people will at once learn to work for society without any rules of law.  Besides, the abolition of capitalism does not immediately create the economic prerequisites for such a change.

Now, there are no other rules than those of “bourgeois law".  To this extent, therefore, there still remains the need for a state, which, while safeguarding the common ownership of the means of production, would safeguard equality in labor and in the distribution of products.

The state withers away insofar as there are no longer any capitalists, any classes, and, consequently, no class can be suppressed.

But the state has not yet completely withered away, since there still remains the safeguarding of “bourgeois law", which sanctifies actual inequality.  For the state to wither away completely, complete communism is necessary.


4. The Higher Phase of Communist Society
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Marx continues:

“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and with it also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished, after labor has become not only a livelihood but life’s prime want, after the productive forces have increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly–only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois law be left behind in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"

Only now can we fully appreciate the correctness of Engels’ remarks mercilessly ridiculing the absurdity of combining the words “freedom” and “state”.  So long as the state exists there is no freedom.  When there is freedom, there will be no state.

The economic basis for the complete withering away of the state is such a high state of development of communism at which the antithesis between mental and physical labor disappears, at which there consequently disappears one of the principal sources of modern social inequality–a source, moreover, which cannot on any account be removed immediately by the mere conversion of the means of production into public property, by the mere expropriation of the capitalists.

This expropriation will make it possible for the productive forces to develop to a tremendous extent.  And when we see how incredibly capitalism is already retarding this development, when we see how much progress could be achieved on the basis of the level of technique already attained, we are entitled to say with the fullest confidence that the expropriation of the capitalists will inevitably result in an enormous development of the productive forces of human society.  But how rapidly this development will proceed, how soon it will reach the point of breaking away from the division of labor, of doing away with the antithesis between mental and physical labor, of transforming labor into “life’s prime want"–we do not and cannot know.

That is why we are entitled to speak only of the inevitable withering away of the state, emphasizing the protracted nature of this process and its dependence upon the rapidity of development of the higher phase of communism, and leaving the question of the time required for, or the concrete forms of, the withering away quite open, because there is no material for answering these questions.

The state will be able to wither away completely when society adopts the rule: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", i.e., when people have become so accustomed to observing the fundamental rules of social intercourse and when their labor has become so productive that they will voluntarily work according to their ability.  “The narrow horizon of bourgeois law", which compels one to calculate with the heartlessness of a Shylock whether one has not worked half an hour more than anybody else–this narrow horizon will then be left behind.  There will then be no need for society, in distributing the products, to regulate the quantity to be received by each; each will take freely “according to his needs".

From the bourgeois point of view, it is easy to declare that such a social order is “sheer utopia” and to sneer at the socialists for promising everyone the right to receive from society, without any control over the labor of the individual citizen, any quantity of truffles, cars, pianos, etc.  Even to this day, most bourgeois “savants” confine themselves to sneering in this way, thereby betraying both their ignorance and their selfish defence of capitalism.

Ignorance–for it has never entered the head of any socialist to “promise” that the higher phase of the development of communism will arrive; as for the greatest socialists’ forecast that it will arrive, it presupposes not the present ordinary run of people, who, like the seminary students in Pomyalovsky’s  stories, [2] are capable of damaging the stocks of public wealth “just for fun", and of demanding the impossible.

Until the “higher” phase of communism arrives, the socialists demand the strictest control by society and by the state over the measure of labor and the measure of consumption; but this control must start with the expropriation of the capitalists, with the establishment of workers’ control over the capitalists, and must be exercised not by a state of bureaucrats, but by a state of armed workers.

The selfish defence of capitalism by the bourgeois ideologists (and their hangers-on, like the Tseretelis, Chernovs, and Co.) consists in that they substitute arguing and talk about the distant future for the vital and burning question of present-day politics, namely, the expropriation of the capitalists, the conversion of all citizens into workers and other employees of one huge “syndicate”–the whole state–and the complete subordination of the entire work of this syndicate to a genuinely democratic state, the state of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.

In fact, when a learned professor, followed by the philistine, followed in turn by the Tseretelis and Chernovs, talks of wild utopias, of the demagogic promises of the Bolsheviks, of the impossibility of “introducing” socialism, it is the higher stage, or phase, of communism he has in mind, which no one has ever promised or even thought to “introduce”, because, generally speaking, it cannot be “introduced”.

And this brings us to the question of the scientific distinction between socialism and communism which Engels touched on in his above-quoted argument about the incorrectness of the name “Social-Democrat".  Politically, the distinction between the first, or lower, and the higher phase of communism will in time, probably, be tremendous.  But it would be ridiculous to recognize this distinction now, under capitalism, and only individual anarchists, perhaps, could invest it with primary importance (if there still are people among the anarchists who have learned nothing from the “Plekhanov” conversion of the Kropotkins, of Grave, Corneliseen, and other “stars” of anarchism into social- chauvinists or “anarcho-trenchists", as Ghe, one of the few anarchists who have still preserved a sense of humor and a conscience, has put it).

But the scientific distinction between socialism and communism is clear.  What is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the “first”, or lower, phase of communist society.  Insofar as the means of production becomes common property, the word “communism” is also applicable here, providing we do not forget that this is not complete communism.  The great significance of Marx’s explanations is that here, too, he consistently applies materialist dialectics, the theory of development, and regards communism as something which develops out of capitalism. Instead of scholastically invented, “concocted” definitions and fruitless disputes over words (What is socialism? What is communism?), Marx gives an analysis of what might be called the stages of the economic maturity of communism.

In its first phase, or first stage, communism cannot as yet be fully mature economically and entirely free from traditions or vestiges of capitalism.  Hence the interesting phenomenon that communism in its first phase retains “the narrow horizon of bourgeois law".  Of course, bourgeois law in regard to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules of law.

It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!

This may sound like a paradox or simply a dialectical conundrum of which Marxism is often accused by people who have not taken the slightest trouble to study its extraordinarily profound content.

But in fact, remnants of the old, surviving in the new, confront us in life at every step, both in nature and in society.  And Marx did not arbitrarily insert a scrap of “bourgeois” law into communism, but indicated what is economically and politically inevitable in a society emerging out of the womb of capitalism.

Democracy means equality.  The great significance of the proletariat’s struggle for equality and of equality as a slogan will be clear if we correctly interpret it as meaning the abolition of classes.  But democracy means only formal equality. And as soon as equality is achieved for all members of society in relation to ownership of the means of production, that is, equality of labor and wages, humanity will inevitably be confronted with the question of advancing further from formal equality to actual equality, i.e., to the operation of the rule “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".  By what stages, by means of what practical measures humanity will proceed to this supreme aim we do not and cannot know.  But it is important to realize how infinitely mendacious is the ordinary bourgeois conception of socialism as something lifeless, rigid, fixed once and for all, whereas in reality only socialism will be the beginning of a rapid, genuine, truly mass forward movement, embracing first the majority and then the whole of the population, in all spheres of public and private life.

Democracy is of enormous importance to the working class in its struggle against the capitalists for its emancipation. But democracy is by no means a boundary not to be overstepped; it is only one of the stages on the road from feudalism to capitalism, and from capitalism to communism.

Democracy is a form of the state, it represents, on the one hand, the organized, systematic use of force against persons; but, on the other hand, it signifies the formal recognition of equality of citizens, the equal right of all to determine the structure of, and to administer, the state.  This, in turn, results in the fact that, at a certain stage in the development of democracy, it first welds together the class that wages a revolutionary struggle against capitalism–the proletariat, and enables it to crush, smash to atoms, wipe off the face of the earth the bourgeois, even the republican-bourgeois, state machine, the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy and to substitute for them a more democratic state machine, but a state machine nevertheless, in the shape of armed workers who proceed to form a militia involving the entire population.

Here “quantity turns into quality": such a degree of democracy implies overstepping the boundaries of bourgeois society and beginning its socialist reorganization.  If really all take part in the administration of the state, capitalism cannot retain its hold.  The development of capitalism, in turn, creates the preconditions that enable really “all” to take part in the administration of the state.  Some of these preconditions are: universal literacy, which has already been achieved in a number of the most advanced capitalist countries, then the “training and disciplining” of millions of workers by the huge, complex, socialized apparatus of the postal service, railways, big factories, large-scale commerce, banking, etc., etc.

Given these economic preconditions, it is quite possible, after the overthrow of the capitalists and the bureaucrats, to proceed immediately, overnight, to replace them in the control over production and distribution, in the work of keeping account of labor and products, by the armed workers, by the whole of the armed population.  (The question of control and accounting should not be confused with the question of the scientifically trained staff of engineers, agronomists, and so on.  These gentlemen are working today in obedience to the wishes of the capitalists and will work even better tomorrow in obedience to the wishes of the armed workers.)

Accounting and control–that is mainly what is needed for the “smooth working", for the proper functioning, of the first phase of communist society. All citizens are transformed into hired employees of the state, which consists of the armed workers. All citizens becomes employees and workers of a single countrywide state “syndicate”.  All that is required is that they should work equally, do their proper share of work, and get equal pay; the accounting and control necessary for this have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost and reduced to the extraordinarily simple operations–which any literate person can perform–of supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and issuing appropriate receipts. [1]

When the majority of the people begin independently and everywhere to keep such accounts and exercise such control over the capitalists (now converted into employees) and over the intellectual gentry who preserve their capitalist habits, this control will really become universal, general, and popular; and there will be no getting away from it, there will be “nowhere to go".

The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labor and pay.

But this “factory” discipline, which the proletariat, after defeating the capitalists, after overthrowing the exploiters, will extend to the whole of society, is by no means our ideal, or our ultimate goal.  It is only a necessary step for thoroughly cleansing society of all the infamies and abominations of capitalist exploitation, and for further progress.

From the moment all members of society, or at least the vast majority, have learned to administer the state themselves , have taken this work into their own hands, have organized control over the insignificant capitalist minority, over the gentry who wish to preserve their capitalist habits and over the workers who have been thoroughly corrupted by capitalism–from this moment the need for government of any kind begins to disappear altogether.  The more complete the democracy, the nearer the moment when it becomes unnecessary. The more democratic the “state” which consists of the armed workers, and which is “no longer a state in the proper sense of the word", the more rapidly every form of state begins to wither away.

For when all have learned to administer and actually to independently administer social production, independently keep accounts and exercise control over the parasites, the sons of the wealthy, the swindlers and other “guardians of capitalist traditions", the escape from this popular accounting and control will inevitably become so incredibly difficult, such a rare exception, and will probably be accompanied by such swift and severe punishment (for the armed workers are practical men and not sentimental intellectuals, and they scarcely allow anyone to trifle with them), that the necessity of observing the simple, fundamental rules of the community will very soon become a habit .

Then the door will be thrown wide open for the transition from the first phase of communist society to its higher phase, and with it to the complete withering away of the state.

Further below, on pp. 464, 470, 471-73 of this volume, Lenin is quoting from the same work by Marx (op. cit., pp. 26, 17, 19).

[2] Reference is to the pupils of a seminary who won notoriety by their extreme ignorance and barbarous customs. They were portrayed by N. G. Pomyalovsky, a Russian author.

Next: The Vulgarisation of Marxism by Opportunists


Plekhanov’s Controversy with the Anarchists Kautsky’s Controversy with the Opportunists Kautsky’s Controversy with Pannekoek

The question of the relation of the state to the social
  revolution, and of the social revolution to the state, like the
  question of revolution generally, was given very little
  attention by the leading theoreticians and publicists of the
  Second International (1889-1914). But the most characteristic
  thing about the process of the gradual growth of opportunism
  that led to the collapse of the Second International in 1914 is
  the fact that even when these people were squarely faced with
  this question they tried to evade it or ignored it.

In general, it may be said that evasiveness over the question of
  the relation of the proletarian revolution to the state--an
  evasiveness which benefited and fostered opportunism--resulted
  in the distortion of Marxism and in its complete vulgarization.

To characterize this lamentable process, if only briefly, we shall take
  the most prominent theoreticians of Marxism: Plekhanov and Kautsky.


1. Plekhanov’s Controversy with the Anarchists
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Plekhanov wrote a special pamphlet on the relation of anarchism to socialism, entitled Anarchism and Socialism , which was published in german in 1894.

In treating this subject, Plekhanov contrived completely to evade the most urgent, burning, and most politically essential issue in the struggle against anarchism, namely, the relation of the revolution to the state, and the question of the state in general! His pamphlet falls into two distinct parts: one of them is historical and literary, and contains valuable material on the history of the ideas of Stirner, Proudhon, and others; the other is philistine, and contains a clumsy dissertation on the theme that an anarchist cannot be distinguished from a bandit.

It is a most amusing combination of subjects and most characteristic of Plekhanov’s whole activity on the eve of the revolution and during the revolutionary period in Russia. In fact, in the years 1905 to 1917, Plekhanov revealed himself as a semi-doctrinaire and semi-philistine who, in politics, trailed in the wake of the bourgeoisie.

We have now seen how, in their controversy with the anarchists, Marx and Engels with the utmost thoroughness explained their views on the relation of revolution to the state. In 1891, in his foreword to Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme , Engels wrote that “we”—that is, Engels and Marx—"were at that time, hardly two years after the Hague Congress of the [First] International, [1] engaged in the most violent struggle against Bakunin and his anarchists.”

The anarchists had tried to claim the Paris Commune as their “own”, so to say, as a collaboration of their doctrine; and they completely misunderstood its lessons and Marx’s analysis of these lessons. Anarchism has given nothing even approximating true answers to the concrete political questions: Must the old state machine be smashed? And what should be put in its place?

But to speak of “anarchism and socialism” while completely evading the question of the state, and disregarding the whole development of Marxism before and after the Commune, meant inevitably slipping into opportunism. For what opportunism needs most of all is that the two questions just mentioned should not be raised at all. That in itself is a victory for opportunism.


2. Kautsky’s Controversy with the Opportunists
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Undoubtedly, an immeasurably larger number of Kautsky’s works have been translated into Russian than into any other language. It is not without reason that some German Social-Democrats say in jest that Kautsky is read more in Russia than in Germany (let us say, in parenthesis, that this jest has a far deeper historical meaning than those who first made it suspect. The Russian workers, by making in 1905 an unusually great and unprecedented demand for the best works of the best Social- Democratic literature and editions of these works in quantities unheard of in other countries, rapidly transplanted, so to speak, the enormous experience of a neighboring, more advanced country to the young soil of our proletarian movement).

Besides his popularization of Marxism, Kautsky is particularly known in our country for his controversy with the opportunists, with Bernstein at their head. One fact, however, is almost unknown, one which cannot be ignored if we set out to investigate how Kautsky drifted into the morass of unbelievably disgraceful confusion and defence of social-chauvinism during the supreme crisis of 1914-15. This fact is as follows: shortly before he came out against the most prominent representatives of opportunism in France (Millerand and Jaures) and in Germany (Bernstein), Kautsky betrayed very considerable vacillation. The Marxist Zarya , [2] which was published in Stuttgart in 1901-02, and advocated revolutionary proletarian views, was forced to enter into controversy with Kautsky and describe as “elastic” the half-hearted, evasive resolution, conciliatory towards the opportunists, that he proposed at the International Socialist Congress in Paris in 1900. [3] Kautsky’s letters published in Germany reveal no less hesitancy on his part before he took the field against Bernstein.

Of immeasurably greater significance, however, is the fact that, in his very controversy with the opportunists, in his formulation of the question and his manner of treating it, we can now see, as we study the history of Kautsky’s latest betrayal of Marxism, his systematic deviation towards opportunism precisely on the question of the state.

Let us take Kautsky’s first important work against opportunism, Bernstein and the Social-Democratic Programme . Kautsky refutes Bernstein in detail, but here is a characteristic thing:

Bernstein, in his Premises of Socialism , of Herostratean fame, accuses Marxism of “Blanquism” (an accusation since repeated thousands of times by the opportunists and liberal bourgeoisie in Russia against the revolutionary Marxists, the Bolsheviks). In this connection Bernstein dwells particularly on Marx’s The Civil War in France , and tries, quite unsuccessfully, as we have seen, to identify Marx’s views on the lessons of the Commune with those of Proudhon. Bernstein pays particular attention to the conclusion which Marx emphasized in his 1872 preface to the Communist Manifesto , namely, that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes”.

This statement “pleased” Bernstein so much that he used it no less than three times in his book, interpreting it in the most distorted, opportunist way.

As we have seen, Marx meant that the working-class must smash, break, shatter ( sprengung , explosion—the expression used by Engels) the whole state machine. But according to Bernstein it would appear as though Marx in these words warned the working class against excessive revolutionary zeal when seizing power.

A cruder more hideous distortion of Marx’s idea cannot be imagined.

How, then, did Kautsky proceed in his most detailed refutation of Bernsteinism?

He refrained from analyzing the utter distortion of Marxism by opportunism on this point. He cited the above-quoted passage from Engels’ preface to Marx’s Civil War and said that according to Marx the working class cannot simply take over the ready-made state machinery, but that, generally speaking, it can take it over—and that was all. Kautsky did not say a word about the fact that Bernstein attributed to Marx the very opposite of Marx’s real idea, that since 1852 Marx had formulated the task of the proletarian revolution as being to “smash” the state machine.

The result was that the most essential distinction between Marxism and opportunism on the subject of the tasks of the proletarian revolution was slurred over by Kautsky!

“We can quite safely leave the solution of the problems of the proletarian dictatorship of the future,” said Kautsky, writing “against” Bernstein. (p.172, German edition)

This is not a polemic against Bernstein, but, in essence, a concession to him, a surrender to opportunism; for at present the opportunists ask nothing better than to “quite safely leave to the future” all fundamental questions of the tasks of the proletarian revolution.

From 1852 to 1891, or for 40 years, Marx and Engels taught the proletariat that it must smash the state machine. Yet, in 1899, Kautsky, confronted with the complete betrayal of Marxism by the opportunists on this point, fraudulently substituted for the question whether it is necessary to smash this machine the question for the concrete forms in which it is to be smashed, and then sought refuge behind the “indisputable” (and barren) philistine truth that concrete forms cannot be known in advance!!

A gulf separates Marx and Kautsky over their attitude towards the proletarian party’s task of training the working class for revolution.

Let us take the next, more mature, work by Kautsky, which was also largely devoted to a refutation of opportunist errors. It is his pamphlet, The Social Revolution . In this pamphlet, the author chose as his special theme the question of “the proletarian revolution” and “the proletarian regime”. He gave much that was exceedingly valuable, but he avoided the question of the state. Throughout the pamphlet the author speaks of the winning of state power—and no more; that is, he has chosen a formula which makes a concession to the opportunists, inasmuch as it admits the possibility of seizing power without destroying the state machine. The very thing which Marx in 1872 declared to be “obsolete” in the programme of the Communist Manifesto , is revived by Kautsky in 1902.

A special section in the pamphlet is devoted to the “forms and weapons of the social revolution”. Here Kautsky speaks of the mass political strike, of civil war, and of the “instruments of the might of the modern large state, its bureaucracy and the army"; but he does not say a word about what the Commune has already taught the workers. Evidently, it was not without reason that Engels issued a warning, particularly to the German socialists, against “superstitious reverence” for the state.

Kautsky treats the matter as follows: the victorious proletariat “will carry out the democratic programme”, and he goes on to formulate its clauses. But he does not say a word about the new material provided in 1871 on the subject of the replacement of bourgeois democracy by proletarian democracy. Kautsky disposes of the question by using such “impressive-sounding” banalities as:

“Still, it goes without saying that we shall not achieve supremacy under the present conditions. Revolution itself presupposes long and deep-going struggles, which, in themselves, will change our present political and social structure.”

Undoubtedly, this “goes without saying,” just as the fact that horses eat oats of the Volga flows into the Caspian. Only it is a pity that an empty and bombastic phrase about “deep-going” struggles is used to avoid a question of vital importance to the revolutionary proletariat, namely, what makes its revolution “deep-going” in relation to the state, to democracy, as distinct from previous, non-proletarian revolutions.

By avoiding this question, Kautsky in practice makes a concession to opportunism on this most essential point, although in words he declares stern war against it and stresses the importance of the “idea of revolution” (how much is this “idea” worth when one is afraid to teach the workers the concrete lessons of revolution?), or says, “revolutionary idealism before everything else”, or announces that the English workers are now “hardly more than petty bourgeois”.

“The most varied form of enterprises—bureaucratic [??], trade unionist, co-operative, private... can exist side by side in socialist society,” Kautsky writes. “... There are, for example, enterprises which cannot do without a bureaucratic [??] organization, such as the railways. Here the democratic organization may take the following shape: the workers elect delegates who form a sort of parliament, which establishes the working regulations and supervises the management of the bureaucratic apparatus. The management of other countries may be transferred to the trade unions, and still others may become co-operative enterprises.”

This argument is erroneous; it is a step backward compared with the explanations Marx and Engels gave in the seventies, using the lessons of the Commune as an example.

As far as the supposedly necessary “bureaucratic” organization is concerned, there is no difference whatever between a railway and any other enterprise in large-scale machine industry, any factory, large shop, or large-scale capitalist agricultural enterprise. The technique of all these enterprises makes absolutely imperative the strictest discipline, the utmost precision on the part of everyone in carrying out his allotted task, for otherwise the whole enterprise may come to a stop, or machinery or the finished product may be damaged. In all these enterprises the workers will, of course, “elect delegates who will form a sort of parliament”.

The whole point, however, is that this “sort of parliament” will not be a parliament in the sense of a bourgeois parliamentary institution. The whole point is that this “sort of parliament” will not merely “establish the working regulations and supervise the management of the bureaucratic apparatus,” as Kautsky, whose thinking does not go beyond the bounds of bourgeois parliamentarianism, imagines. In socialist society, the “sort of parliament” consisting of workers’ deputies will, of course, “establish the working regulations and supervise the management” of the “apparatus,” but this apparatus will not be “bureaucratic.” The workers, after winning political power, will smash the old bureaucratic apparatus, shatter it to its very foundations, and raze it to the ground; they will replace it by a new one, consisting of the very same workers and other employees, against whose transformation into bureaucratic will at once be taken which were specified in detail by Marx and Engels: (1) not only election, but also recall at any time; (2) pay not to exceed that of a workman; (3) immediate introduction of control by all , so that all may become “bureaucrats” for a time and that, therefore, nobody may be able to become a “bureaucrat”.

Kautsky has not reflected at all on Marx’s words: “The Commune was a working, not parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time.”

Kautsky has not understood at all the difference between bourgeois parliamentarism, which combines democracy (not for the people) with bureaucracy (against the people), and proletarian democracy, which will take immediate steps to cut bureaucracy down to the roots, and which will be able to carry these measures through to the end, to the complete abolition of bureaucracy, to the introduction of complete democracy for the people.

Kautsky here displays the same old “superstitious reverence” for the state, and “superstitious belief” in bureaucracy.

Let us now pass to the last and best of Kautsky’s works against the opportunists, his pamphlet The Road to Power (which, I believe, has not been published in Russian, for it appeared in 1909, when reaction was at its height in our country). This pamphlet is a big step forward, since it does not deal with the revolutionary programme in general, as the pamphlet of 1899 against Bernstein, or with the tasks of the social revolution irrespective of the time of its occurrence, as the 1902 pamphlet, The Social Revolution ; it deals with the concrete conditions which compels us to recognize that the “era of revolutions” is setting in.

The author explicitly points to the aggravation of class antagonisms in general and to imperialism, which plays a particularly important part in this respect. After the “revolutionary period of 1789-1871” in Western Europe, he says, a similar period began in the East in 1905. A world war is approaching with menacing rapidity. “It [the proletariat] can no longer talk of premature revolution.” “We have entered a revolutionary period.” The “revolutionary era is beginning”.

These statements are perfectly clear. This pamphlet of Kautsky’s should serve as a measure of comparison of what the German Social-Democrats promised to be before the imperialist war and the depth of degradation to which they, including Kautsky himself, sank when the war broke out. “The present situation,” Kautsky wrote in the pamphlet under survey, “is fraught with the danger that we [i.e., the German Social-Democrats] may easily appear to be more ‘moderate’ than we really are.” It turned out that in reality the German Social-Democratic Party was much more moderate and opportunist than it appeared to be!

It is all the more characteristic, therefore, that although Kautsky so explicitly declared that the era of revolution had already begun, in the pamphlet which he himself said was devoted to an analysis of the “political revolution”, he again completely avoided the question of the state.

These evasions of the question, these omissions and equivocations, inevitably added up to that complete swing-over to opportunism with which we shall now have to deal.

Kautsky, the German Social-Democrats’ spokesman, seems to have declared: I abide by revolutionary views (1899), I recognize, above all, the inevitability of the social revolution of the proletariat (1902), I recognize the advent of a new era of revolutions (1909). Still, I am going back on what Marx said as early as 1852, since the question of the tasks of the proletarian revolution in relation to the state is being raised (1912).

It was in this point-blank form that the question was put in Kautsky’s controversy with Pannekoek.


3. Kautsky’s Controversy with Pannekoek
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


In opposing Kautsky, Pannekoek came out as one of the representatives of the “Left radical” trend which included Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Radek, and others. Advocating revolutionary tactics, they were united in the conviction that Kautsky was going over to the “Centre”, which wavered in an unprincipled manner between Marxism and opportunism. This view was proved perfectly correct by the war, when this “Centrist” (wrongly called Marxist) trend, or Kautskyism, revealed itself in all its repulsive wretchedness.

In an article touching on the question of the state, entitled “Mass Action and Revolution” ( Neue Zeit , 1912, Vol.XXX, 2), Pannekoek described Kautsky’s attitude as one of “passive radicalism”, as “a theory of inactive expectancy”. “Kautsky refuses to see the process of revolution,” wrote Pannekoek (p.616). In presenting the matter in this way, Pannekoek approached the subject which interests us, namely, the tasks of the proletarian revolution in relation to the state.

“The struggle of the proletariat,” he wrote, “is not merely a struggle against the bourgeoisie for state power, but a struggle against state power.... The content of this [the proletarian] revolution is the destruction and dissolution [Auflosung] of the instruments of power of the state with the aid of the instruments of power of the proletariat. (p.544) “The struggle will cease only when, as the result of it, the state organization is completely destroyed. The organization of the majority will then have demonstrated its superiority by destroying the organization of the ruling minority.” (p.548)

The formulation in which Pannekoek presented his ideas suffers from serious defects. But its meaning is clear nonetheless, and it is interesting to note how Kautsky combated it.

“Up to now,” he wrote, “the antithesis between the Social-Democrats and the anarchists has been that the former wished to win the state power while the latter wished to destroy it. Pannekoek wants to do both.” (p.724)

Although Pannekoek’s exposition lacks precision and concreteness—not to speak of other shortcomings of his article which have no bearing on the present subject—Kautsky seized precisely on the point of principle raised by Pannekoek; and on this fundamental point of principle Kautsky completely abandoned the Marxist position and went over wholly to opportunism. His definition of the distinction between the Social-Democrats and the anarchists is absolutely wrong; he completely vulgarizes and distorts Marxism.

The distinction between Marxists and the anarchists is this: (1) The former, while aiming at the complete abolition of the state, recognize that this aim can only be achieved after classes have been abolished by the socialist revolution, as the result of the establishment of socialism, which leads to the withering away of the state. The latter want to abolish he state completely overnight, not understanding the conditions under which the state can be abolished. (2) The former recognize that after the proletariat has won political power it must completely destroy the old state machine and replace it by a new one consisting of an organization of the armed workers, after the type of the Commune. The latter, while insisting on the destruction of the state machine, have a very vague idea of what the proletariat will put in its place and how it will use its revolutionary power. The anarchists even deny that the revolutionary proletariat should use the state power, they reject its revolutionary dictatorship. (3) The former demand that the proletariat be trained for revolution by utilizing the present state. The anarchists reject this.

In this controversy, it is not Kautsky but Pannekoek who represents Marxism, for it was Marx who taught that the proletariat cannot simply win state power in the sense that the old state apparatus passes into new hands, but must smash this apparatus, must break it and replace it by a new one.

Kautsky abandons Marxism for the opportunist camp, for this destruction of the state machine, which is utterly unacceptable to the opportunists, completely disappears from his argument, and he leaves a loophole for them in that “conquest” may be interpreted as the simple acquisition of a majority.

To cover up his distortion of Marxism, Kautsky behaves like a doctrinaire: he puts forward a “quotation” from Marx himself. In 1850, Marx wrote that a “resolute centralization of power in the hands of the state authority” was necessary, and Kautsky triumphantly asks: does Pannekoek want to destroy “Centralism”?

This is simply a trick, like Bernstein’s identification of the views of Marxism and Proudhonism on the subject of federalism as against centralism.

Kautsky’s “quotation” is neither here nor there. Centralism is possible with both the old and the new state machine. If the workers voluntarily unite their armed forces, this will be centralism, but it will be based on the “complete destruction” of the centralized state apparatus—the standing army, the police, and the bureaucracy. Kautsky acts like an outright swindler by evading the perfectly well-known arguments of Marx and Engels on the Commune and plucking out a quotation which has nothing to do with the point at issue.

“Perhaps he [Pannekoek],” Kautsky continues, “wants to abolish the state functions of the officials? But we cannot do without officials even in the party and trade unions, let alone in the state administration. And our programme does not demand the abolition of state officials, but that they be elected by the people.... We are discussing here not the form the administrative apparatus of the ‘future state’ will assume, but whether our political struggle abolishes [literally dissolves - auflost] the state power before we have captured it . [Kautsky’s italics] Which ministry with its officials could be abolished?” Then follows an enumeration of the ministeries of education, justice, finance, and war. “No, not one of the present ministries will be removed by our political struggle against the government.... I repeat, in order to prevent misunderstanding: we are not discussing here the form the ‘future state’ will be given by the victorious Social-Democrats, but how the present state is changed by our opposition.” (p.725)

This is an obvious trick. Pannekoek raised the question of revolution. Both the title of his article and the passages quoted above clearly indicate this. By skipping to the question of “opposition”, Kautsky substitutes the opportunist for the revolutionary point of view. What he says means: at present we are an opposition; what we shall be after we have captured power, that we shall see. Revolution has vanished! And that is exactly what the opportunists wanted.

The point at issue is neither opposition nor political struggle in general, but revolution. Revolution consists in the proletariat destroying the “administrative apparatus” and the whole state machine, replacing it by a new one, made up of the armed workers. Kautsky displays a “superstitious reverence” for “ministries”; but why can they not be replaced, say, by committees of specialists working under sovereign, all-powerful Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies?

The point is not at all whether the “ministries” will remain, or whether “committees of specialists” or some other bodies will be set up; that is quite immaterial. The point is whether the old state machine (bound by thousands of threads to the bourgeoisie and permeated through and through with routine and inertia) shall remain, or be destroyed and replaced by a new one. Revolution consists not in the new class commanding, governing with the aid of the old state machine, but in this class smashing this machine and commanding, governing with the aid of a new machine. Kautsky slurs over this basic idea of Marxism, or he does not understand it at all.

His question about officials clearly shows that he does not understand the lessons of the Commune or the teachings of Marx. “We cannot do without officials even in the party and the trade unions....”

We cannot do without officials under capitalism, under the rule of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat is oppressed, the working people are enslaved by capitalism. Under capitalism, democracy is restricted, cramped, curtailed, mutilated by all the conditions of wage slavery, and the poverty and misery of the people. This and this alone is the reason why the functionaries of our political organizations and trade unions are corrupted – or rather tend to be corrupted—by the conditions of capitalism and betray a tendency to become bureaucrats, i.e., privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people.

That is the essence of bureaucracy; and until the capitalists have been expropriated and the bourgeoisie overthrown, even proletarian functionaries will inevitably be “bureaucratized” to a certain extent.

According to Kautsky, since elected functionaries will remain under socialism, so will officials, so will the bureaucracy! This is exactly where he is wrong. Marx, referring to the example of the Commune, showed that under socialism functionaries will cease to be “bureaucrats”, to be “officials”, they will cease to be so in proportion as—in addition to the principle of election of officials—the principle of recall at any time is also introduced, as salaries are reduced to the level of the wages of the average workman, and as parliamentary institutions are replaced by “working bodies, executive and legislative at the same time”.

As a matter of fact, the whole of Kautsky’s argument against Pannekoek, and particularly the former’s wonderful point that we cannot do without officials even in our party and trade union organizations, is merely a repetition of Bernstein’s old “arguments” against Marxism in general. In his renegade book, The Premises of Socialism , Bernstein combats the ideas of “primitive” democracy, combats what he calls “doctrinaire democracy": binding mandates, unpaid officials, impotent central representative bodies, etc. to prove that this “primitive” democracy is unsound, Bernstein refers to the experience of the British trade unions, as interpreted by the Webbs. [4] Seventy years of development “in absolute freedom”, he says (p.137, German edition), convinced the trade unions that primitive democracy was useless, and they replaced it by ordinary democracy, i.e., parliamentarism combined with bureaucracy.

In reality, the trade unions did not develop “in absolute freedom” but in absolute capitalist slavery, under which, it goes without saying, a number of concessions to the prevailing evil, violence, falsehood, exclusion of the poor from the affairs of “higher” administration, “cannot be done without”. Under socialism much of “primitive” democracy will inevitably be revived, since, for the first time in the history of civilized society the mass of population will rise to taking an independent part, not only in voting and elections, but also in the everyday administration of the state. Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.

Marx’s critico-analytical genius saw in the practical measures of the Commune the turning-point which the opportunists fear and do not want to recognize because of their cowardice, because they do not want to break irrevocably with the bourgeoisie, and which the anarchists do not want to see, either because they are in a hurry or because they do not understand at all the conditions of great social changes. “We must not even think of destroying the old state machine; how can we do without ministries and officials” argues the opportunist, who is completely saturated with philistinism and who, at bottom, not only does not believe in revolution, in the creative power of revolution, but lives in mortal dread of it (like our Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries).

“We must think only of destroying the old state machine; it is no use probing into the concrete lessons of earlier proletarian revolutions and analyzing what to put in the place of what has been destroyed, and how,” argues the anarchist (the best of the anarchist, of course, and not those who, following the Kropotkins and Co., trail behind the bourgeoisie). Consequently, the tactics of the anarchist become the tactics of despair instead of a ruthlessly bold revolutionary effort to solve concrete problems while taking into account the practical conditions of the mass movement.

Marx teaches us to avoid both errors; he teaches us to act with supreme boldness in destroying the entire old state machine, and at the same time he teaches us to put the question concretely: the Commune was able in the space of a few weeks to start building a new, proletarian state machine by introducing such-and-such measures to provide wider democracy and to uproot bureaucracy. Let us learn revolutionary boldness from the Communards; let us see in their practical measures the outline of really urgent and immediately possible measures, and then, following this road, we shall achieve the complete destruction of bureaucracy.

The possibility of this destruction is guaranteed by the fact that socialism will shorten the working day, will raise the people to a new life, will create such conditions for the majority of the population as will enable everybody, without exception, to perform “state functions”, and this will lead to the complete withering away of every form of state in general.

“Its object [the object of the mass strike],” Kautsky continues, “cannot be to destroy the state power; its only object can be to make the government compliant on some specific question, or to replace a government hostile to the proletariat by one willing to meet it half-way [ entgegenkommende ]... But never, under no circumstances can it [that is, the proletarian victory over a hostile government] lead to the destruction of the state power; it can lead only to a certain shifting [ verschiebung ] of the balance of forces within the state power.... The aim of our political struggle remains, as in the past, the conquest of state power by winning a majority in parliament and by raising parliament to the ranks of master of the government.” (pp.726, 727, 732)

This is nothing but the purest and most vulgar opportunism: repudiating revolution in deeds, while accepting it in words. Kautsky’s thoughts go no further than a “government... willing to meet the proletariat half-way"—a step backward to philistinism compared with 1847, when the Communist Manifesto proclaimed “the organization of the proletariat as the ruling class”.

Kautsky will have to achieve his beloved “unity” with the Scheidmanns, Plekhanovs, and Vanderveldes, all of whom agree to fight for a government “willing to meet the proletariat half-way”.

We, however, shall break with these traitors to socialism, and we shall fight for the complete destruction of the old state machine, in order that the armed proletariat itself may become the government . These are two vastly different things.

Kautsky will have to enjoy the pleasant company of the Legiens and Davids, Plekhanovs, Potresovs, Tseretelis, and Chernovs, who are quite willing to work for the “shifting of the balance of forces within the state power”, for “winning a majority in parliament”, and “raising parliament to the ranks of master of the government”. A most worthy object, which is wholly acceptable to the opportunists and which keeps everything within the bounds of the bourgeois parliamentary republic.

We, however, shall break with the opportunists; and the entire class-conscious proletariat will be with us in the fight—not to “shift the balance of forces”, but to overthrow the bourgeoisie, to destroy bourgeois parliamentarism, for a democratic republic after the type of the Commune, or a republic of Soviets of Workers’and Soldiers’Deputies, for the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

To the right of Kautsky in international socialism there are trends such as Socialist 	Monthly [5] in Germany (Legien, David, Kolb, and many others, including the Scandinavian Stauning and Branting), Jaures’ followers and Vandervelde in France and Belgium; Turait, Treves, and other Right-wingers of the Italian Party; the Fabians and “Independents” (the Independent labor Party, which, in fact, has always been dependent on the Liberals) in Britain; and the like. All these gentry, who play a tremendous, very often a predominant role in the parliamentary work and the press of their parties, repudiate outright the dictatorship of the proletariat and pursue a policy of undisguised opportunism. In the eyes of these gentry, the “dictatorship” of the proletariat “contradicts” democracy!! There is really no essential distinction between them and the petty-bourgeois democrats.

Taking this circumstance into consideration, we are justified in drawing the conclusion that the Second International, that is, the overwhelming majority of its official representatives, has completely sunk into opportunism. The experience of the Commune has been not only ignored but distorted. Far from inculcating in the workers’ minds the idea that the time is nearing when they must act to smash the old state machine, replace it by a new one, and in this way make their political rule the foundation for the socialist reorganization of society, they have actually preached to the masses the very opposite and have depicted the “conquest of power” in a way that has left thousands of loopholes for opportunism.

The distortion and hushing up of the question of the relation of the proletarian revolution to the state could not but play an immense role at a time when states, which possess a military apparatus expanded as a consequence of imperialist rivalry, have become military monsters which are exterminating millions of people in order to settle the issue as to whether Britain or Germany—this or that finance capital—is to rule the world. [*]


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Endnotes
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[*] The MS. continues as follows:


Chapter VII: The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917
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The subject indicated in the title of this chapter is so vast that volumes could be written about it. In the present pamphlet we shall have to confine ourselves, naturally, to the most important lessons provided by experience, those bearing directly upon the tasks of the proletariat in the revolution with regard to state power. [Here the manuscript breaks off—Ed.]

[1] The Hague Congress of the First international sat from September 2-7, 1872. It was attended by 65 delegates, among whom were Marx and Engels. The powers of the General Council and the political activity of the proletariat were among the items on the agenda. The Congress deliberations were marked throughout by a sharp struggle against the Bakuninists. The Congress passed a resolution extending the General Council’s powers. Its resolution “On the Political Activity of the Proletariat” stated that the proletariat should organise a political party of its own to ensure the triumph of the social revolution and that the winning of political power was becoming its great task. The Congress expelled Bakunin and Guillaume from the International as disorganisers and founders of a new, anti-proletarian party.

[2] Zarya (Dawn)—a Marxist scientific and political journal published in Stuttgart in 1901-02 by the editors of Iskra. Four issues appeared in three instalments.

[3] Reference is to the Fifth World Congress of the Second international, which met in Paris from September 23 to 27, 1900. On the fundamental issue, “The Winning of Political Power, and Alliances with Bourgeois Parties”, whose discussion was prompted by A. Millerand becoming a member of the Valdeck-Rousseau counter-revolutionary government, the Congress carried a motion tabled by Kautsky. The resolution said that “the entry of a single Socialist into a bourgeois Ministry cannot be considered as the normal beginning for winning political power: it can never be anything but a temporary and exceptional makeshift in an emergency situation”. Afterwards opportunists frequently referred to this point to justify their collaboration with the bourgeoisie.

Zarya published (No. 1, April 1901) an article by Plekhanov entitled “A Few Words About the Latest World Socialist Congress in Paris. An Open Letter to the Comrades Who Have Empowered Me”, which sharply criticised Kautsky’s resolution.

[4] This refers to Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Industrial Democracy.

[5] Socialist Monthly (Sozialistische Monatshefte)—the principal journal of the opportunists among the German Social-Democrats, a periodical of international opportunism. It was published in Berlin from 1897 to 1933. During the world imperialist war of 1914-18 it took a social-chauvinist stand.


PostScript to the First Edition
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


This pamphlet was written in August and September 1917.  I had
      already drawn up the plan for the next, the seventh chapter,
      "The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917".
      Apart from the title, however, I had no time to write a single
      line of the chapter; I was "interrupted" by a political
      crisis--the eve of the October revolution of 1917.  Such an
      "interruption" can only be welcomed; but the writing of the
      second part of this pamphlet ("The Experience of the Russian
      Revolutions of 1905 and 1917") will probably have to be put off
      for a long time.  It is more pleasant and useful to go through
      the "experience of revolution" than to write about it.

The Author

Petrograd November 30, 1917